While Central California awaits the ‘Super’ El Niño, Southern California is getting a preview of the damage that a warmer Pacific Ocean can do.

Last week, portions of the historic wooden boardwalk on the Long Beach Peninsula were wiped out after waves overpowered a seawall.

In Dana Point, officials red-tagged beachfront homes — meaning they were deemed unsafe to occupy — and boulders were hauled in to protect homes from the high surf.

In another headline maker, the high waves created a massive sinkhole in the driveway of Nicolas Cage’s oceanfront residence in Malibu. As the sinkhole grew, authorities expanded an evacuation order to 31 properties.

Intense ocean waves fueled by Hurricane Marie inflicted the damage.

ow, Southern California residents are wondering what comes next, particularly with an El Niño-related Kelvin wave expected to reach the region next month.

“Unfortunately this is just a preview,” University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain said last week in a YouTube presentation. “The coastal flooding … will get worse this fall and especially this winter.”

Kelvin Waves

What are Kelvin waves?

According to the Los Angeles Times, “Until recently, Kelvin waves were a pretty obscure concept. But they’re fundamentally at the heart of El Niño: a climate pattern in which the ocean waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific heat up and spur changes in the atmosphere that can affect weather around the world.”

As Kelvin waves move through the ocean, they can raise sea levels by as much as a foot for extended periods of time.

The current Kelvin wave is expected to reach Southern California in early October, although no one knows for sure when it will arrive.

“They’re pretty epic. They travel something like 25,000 kilometers (15,500 miles) all the way from the western equatorial Pacific up … to the Gulf of Alaska, and it takes about 120 days,” Dillon Amaya, an assistant professor a North Carolina State and a wave expert, told The Times.

‘Super’ El Niño Expected

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration measures El Niño conditions using the Relative Oceanic Niño Index, or RONI, a three-month average of relative sea surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific.

The latest published RONI reading, covering June through August, was 1.4 degrees Celsius above average.

NOAA said Thursday that El Niño continues to strengthen and there is a greater than 90% chance it will become a “very strong” event during the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter. A RONI reading of 2.0 degrees Celsius or higher falls into NOAA’s “very strong” category, sometimes informally called a “super” El Niño.