California King Tides 2026: The Beach Is Not a Backdrop.
Hurricane Marie's south swell took the sand first. It stripped beaches and damaged homes, and three towns declared local emergencies: Laguna Beach, Dana Point, and Carlsbad. The California king tides, the highest of the year, haven't even started.
We talk about the beach as if it were an address. We give directions to it and rank its breaks by skill level (we did exactly that in our San Diego surf guide). But a beach is a surface, and surfaces move.
What the King Tides Actually Are
King tides are not storms. They are the highest predictable high tides of the year, produced when the sun, moon, and Earth line up, especially when the moon is close. The California Coastal Commission says they can run one to two feet above an ordinary high tide. They aren't caused by climate change, but state officials treat them as a preview of what higher seas would look like, which is why they keep showing up in planning documents.
The dates this season are November 24 to 26, December 23 to 25, and January 21 to 22. At Los Angeles Harbor, published tide tables put those highs at roughly 7.1 to 7.3 feet.
On its own, a king tide is a good excuse to walk the beach at an odd hour. The trouble starts when something else arrives at the same time.
Six Inches of Extra Ocean
Something else is on its way. El Niño, the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific, is sending a Kelvin wave up the coast. A Kelvin wave is a slow pulse of warm water that travels along the shoreline and lifts the sea surface as it goes. NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) puts the typical rise at around six inches, and some estimates for this fall run closer to a foot. Forecasters expect it could keep local water levels elevated for months, and the Coastal Commission has warned this El Niño could turn out historically strong. Forecasts are probabilities, not schedules, but the direction is clear.
The wave didn't cause this year's damage. It raises the starting line for every swell that follows.
Six inches sounds like nothing. On a gently sloping beach, it is a lot. A small rise in water level pushes the waterline a long way inland, which puts each swell onto sand it wouldn't normally reach. Coastal officials warn that the real risk comes when that higher baseline overlaps with a king tide, a big swell, or a winter storm.
What the Last Big One Did
We have a recent example of how this goes. The 2015 to 2016 El Niño ranks among the three strongest on record, alongside 1982 to 1983 and 1997 to 1998. Researchers at the USGS (the U.S. Geological Survey) tracked 29 beaches from Washington to Southern California and found winter erosion 76 percent above normal, the highest ever recorded. After the 1997 to 1998 event, some beaches needed about a decade to recover.
Southern California got off lighter than the rest of the coast. A later USGS study found its beaches retreated about 32 feet on average that winter, with nearly four in five losing ground. Central California lost roughly 150 feet. Lighter is relative, though. Thirty-two feet is a lot of beach to hand back in one season.
The Edge You Stand On
Surf culture has always lived at the edge, and it has always known the edge moves. Sandbars shift every season. The spot that worked in October is flat by February, and the one nobody paddled last year starts breaking. People who surf for decades learn to read that and stop treating any single break as permanent. A few of the places in our San Diego guide sit on bluffs that have already given way. Blacks Beach lost part of its cliff in 2023 after heavy rain. It's a fact about where we live, like June gloom.
There is one thing worth doing. The Coastal Commission runs a King Tides Project that asks anyone with a phone to photograph the highest tides and submit the pictures. The photos build a record of where the water actually goes. It's a rare chance to document the edge instead of just standing on it.
Go down on November 24. Check a tide chart, get there early, and look at where the line sits. Then go back in January and stand in the same spot.
See what moved.