storm surges – Enviro Updates

King tides and winter runoff push Petaluma River to highest recorded level in decades

January 2, 2026

Don Frances, BAY AREA NEWS GROUP

An extraordinarily strong bout of seasonal king tides and runoff from the latest rainstorm combined Friday to push the crest of the Petaluma River to the highest point in nearly the last three decades even as bay tides unleashed flooding in Marin County and other parts of the Bay Area before a weekend of rain and high winds.

The Petaluma River, one of Sonoma County’s largest tidal sloughs, had not topped its banks, but water levels surged to 8.33 feet by 1 p.m. Friday, according to a National Weather Service gauge at the D Street Bridge, where the previous recorded high was 6.4 feet in 1998.

The new record was likely to be broken again by late morning Saturday as the king tides were expected to peak amid the incoming rainstorm, said National Weather Service meteorologist Rachel Kennedy.

Waterflooding, king tides, Petaluma River, storm surges

California says oceans expected to rise higher than thought

Ellen Knickmeyer, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Read the report: Rising Seas in California

New climate-change findings mean the Pacific Ocean off California may rise higher, and storms and high tides hit harder, than previously thought, officials said.
The state’s Ocean Protection Council on Wednesday revised upward its predictions for how much water off California will rise as the climate warms. The forecast helps agencies in the nation’s most populous state plan for climate change as rising water seeps toward low-lying airports, highways and communities, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Discoveries that ice sheets are melting increasingly fast in Antarctica, which holds nearly 90 percent of the world’s ice, largely spurred the change.
As fossil-fuel emissions warm the Earth’s atmosphere, melting Antarctic ice is expected to raise the water off California’s 1,100 miles (1,770 kilometers) of coastline even more than for the world as a whole.
Read more at: California says oceans expected to rise higher than thought | The Press Democrat