What's that? 'Cause it seems like that's important when you're talking about El Niño and what it's doing to coastal lines.

All that warm water in the Eastern Pacific is getting driven northwards along the coast of California by what's called a Kelvin wave, which is a very long- And slow kind of wave, you can think of it progressing over a period of months.

So this is a very slow wave, and it's working its way northward.

Right now it's along the coast of Baja, California.

It's gonna reach San Diego in October, mid-October probably, and up to, uh, the Bay Area, San Francisco by late October.

And that's very warm water, and when you warm up the water it expands, 'cause warm things expand, and that means that sea level rises.

So we're anticipating that as this wave of warm water moves north along the coast, sea levels are gonna rise half a foot to a foot, something like that, over the next few weeks, few months.

[laughs] But I, I know my grandchildren may not enjoy it in the future.

What's that? Because it seems like that's important when you're talking about El Niño and what it's doing to coastal lines.

All that warm water in the Eastern Pacific is getting driven northwards along the coast of California by what's called a Kelvin wave, which is a very long and slow kind of wave.

You can think of it progressing over a period of months.

So this is a very slow wave, and it's working its way northward.

Right now, it's along the coast of Baja, California.

It's gonna reach San Diego in October, mid-October probably, and up to, uh, the Bay Area, San Francisco by late October, and that's very warm water, and when you warm up the water, it expands, 'cause warm things expand, and that means that sea level rises.

So we're anticipating that as this wave of warm water moves north along the coast, sea levels are gonna rise half a foot to a foot, something like that, over the next few weeks, few months.

I mean, it had a foot of water over the top of it this last storm, but it's still, still there, you know, which is comforting for me [laughs], but I, I know my grandchildren may not e- enjoy it in the future.

Jeff, how did we get here?

We had a bunch of wildfires start up near the Minnesota-Ontario border on Monday, aided by 100-degree temperatures, very dry conditions.

They're in up to severe drought up there.

Strong winds helped fan those fires.

They're out of control, burning even today, and the smoke from those fires has moved over Wisconsin, Michigan, out over the Mid-Atlantic to New York City area, and it's causing hazardous air quality.

That's the highest level of concern on EPA's Air Quality Index scale, and it's gonna hang around Friday and Saturday for sure.

This, uh, I believe is a phrase we started using, uh, in 2023, Canadian wildfires, right, where we started seeing that smoke? I, I remember that for some reason.

They are burning in Canada, but I don't think that Canada is exporting these intentionally.

So, Jeff, I'm going to steer that one to you.

When you get small particles in the atmosphere, it reflects away sunlight and helps cool the surface.

And a lot of the weather forecasts that have been put out the last couple of days have been missing their high temperature forecast because the smoke has been reflecting away enough sunlight to cool things down by a few degrees.

So, yes, you put a lot of particles in the air, it will cool down the planet.

Whether that's significant on a global scale or not, I don't think it's much of an impact.

But certainly globally, since we started burning so many fossil fuels starting in the 1960s and 1970s, it did depress global temperatures some and global sea surface temperatures as well.

We think a reason that the Atlantic hurricane activity was relatively quiet in the 70s and 80s was because of so much particle pollution out over the Atlantic Ocean keeping the waters cool.

Jeff, because you are somebody who writes about this on a big scale, what is being done or what can people do? Is there legislation? Are there other things?

How does the weather data get turned into forecasts we can see on our phones or hear on the radio or pull up on our computer?

Every day, you take weather observations, like 10 billion different weather observations globally.

You've got airport data.

You've got radar.

You've got buoys over the ocean.

You've got satellite data.

You've got data coming in from balloons, from commercial aircraft that send back data.

Uh, Jeff, in a best case scenario, what kind of funding and staffing is needed to keep the data collection and system maintenance for weather forecasting running like it should?