The King Tide made its return to the Bay Area on Saturday morning, leaving its mark on some of the sidewalks along the Embarcadero.
“At the Golden Gate, it was at 10:43 a.m., at 7 feet,” said Lori Lambertson, a staff educator with the Exploratorium.
Lambertson spent her Saturday morning teaching a group of teachers about the King Tide.
“So we have these three events coming together very close in time to give us our royal tides. We have perigee on Thursday, perihelion in January, and a full moon, which was last night,” she said.
Simply put?
“The sun is a little closer, the moon is a little closer, and we have everything lined up during a full moon,” Lambertson said. “So, that’s going to give us these higher-than-normal high tides.”
King Tides may be a rare phenomenon today. However, Lambertson says these tidal events provide an important glimpse into the future.
“These high tides are giving us a glimpse into the future of our normal tides because of sea level rise,” she said. “When sea levels are a foot higher than they are now, which will happen sometime during this century, this high tide that we’re observing today will be the high tide that we observe every day, and the royal tide will be the one that is higher than that.”