Wave Climate Variability in Southern California

The incidence of major wave events is investigated for the Southern California offshore region for the period from 1984 to 1995. The significant influence of the world climate event popularly known as El Niño, which had been shown in an earlier study of the first 83 yr of the century, is seen to be a major influence in the recent decade. Although the overall wave intensity (as measured by the median wave height for all observations during a year) has decreased for the most part in the last 20 yr, the number of large wave events has been very much increased. An averaged sea surface temperature anomaly in the tropics is shown to be well correlated with the increases in large wave events.