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Clear Start, Green Finish: San Diego Ocean Visibility, August 2026 in Review

La Jolla's water ran clearest in the first 10 days of August and murkiest in the last 3, and on every day lifeguards reported, La Jolla Cove read clearer than La Jolla Shores.

Nick Meyers, Nautical Nick8 min read

The Scripps Pier underwater camera at 3:17 p.m. PDT on August 5, graded 32 feet, the clearest frame of the month. Image: Scripps Pier underwater camera, UC San Diego Coastal Ocean Observing Lab.

Clear Start, Green Finish: San Diego Ocean Visibility, August 2026 in Review

At 3:17 in the afternoon on August 5, the underwater camera beneath Scripps Pier in La Jolla looked out through a loose cloud of small silver fish toward a row of pilings fading into blue. The frame graded 32 feet, the clearest of the month. At 12:18 p.m. on August 30, the same camera showed a few orange garibaldi against a green haze. The pilings beyond the nearest had faded to shadow or out of sight, and the frame graded 9 feet.

August ran between those 2 pictures, and mostly in that order. San Diego Lifeguard Services reported visibility at La Jolla Cove and La Jolla Shores on 30 days of the month, and those daily figures averaged 18 feet at the Cove and 13.5 feet at the Shores. The clearest stretch came early, from August 6 to 10, when the Cove held at 25 feet and the Shores at 20. The murkiest came last. On August 30 the Cove fell to 5 feet and the Shores to 4, the only reading under 5 feet at either beach all month. On every one of those 30 days the Cove read clearer than the Shores, by 4.6 feet on average.

The Clear First 10 Days

The camera saw the clear water first. Nautical Nick graded 208 of the camera's daytime frames in August, and the daily median reached 30 feet on August 5 and 28 feet on both August 6 and 7. The lifeguard reports followed. From August 6 through August 10, the Cove read 25 feet and the Shores 20, 5 days without a change at either beach.

The ocean underneath was quiet. Wave height at La Jolla Shores, as estimated by the Open-Meteo marine weather model, topped out between 1.6 and 1.8 feet each day from August 3 to 7. Turbidity, a measure of how much light the particles in the water scatter, held at a daily median of 0.17 NTU (nephelometric turbidity units) from August 6 to 8, among the lowest readings of the month. Those readings come from automated sensors that the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System runs on Scripps Pier. Chlorophyll, the pigment in the microscopic drifting plants that tint coastal water green, stayed between 0.35 and 0.51 micrograms per liter from August 5 to 8.

A Month of Short Windows

After that first stretch, the clear water no longer held for days at a time. From August 10 to the end of the month, the camera's daily median sat between 9 and 17 feet. Clear water still reached the pier, though. Frames of 28 feet or better turned up on 7 separate days after August 10, each of them on a day whose median sat in the teens.

The softest patch ran from August 16 to 22. On the 6 days lifeguards reported in that span, the Cove read 12 to 15 feet and the Shores 10 to 12. Modeled wave height at the Shores had risen to 3.3 feet on August 15 and 16, and on August 19 the pier's chlorophyll reached 1.04 micrograms per liter, its highest daily median of the month, while turbidity climbed to 0.55 NTU. The camera's median that day was 9 feet.

A second, shorter clear spell followed. The Cove returned to 25 feet on August 23, 24, and 26, and the camera's median rose to 17 feet on August 23 and 24. August 26 brought the largest modeled waves of the month, 4.3 feet, yet the Cove still reported 25 feet that morning.

The Cove and the Shores

La Jolla Cove and La Jolla Shores share a stretch of coast and a single lifeguard report, yet their numbers never met in August. The widest gap came on August 23, when the Cove read 25 feet and the Shores 15. The narrowest came on August 30, at 5 feet against 4. The Cove read 20 feet or better on 15 days, and the Shores managed it on 5.

The City of San Diego describes the Cove as north-facing, with small surf in the summer months, and the Shores as a sandy beach about 1 mile long. The Cove lies inside the San Diego-La Jolla Underwater Park Ecological Reserve, and the Shores sits beside it. Divers pushed for the park around both. In 1970 the City of San Diego set aside 6,000 acres of ocean bottom and tidelands as the San Diego-La Jolla Underwater Park, a project spearheaded by the San Diego Council of Divers under Harold F. Riley to protect marine life from overfishing, according to Wikipedia's history of the park. A 514-acre "Look, Don't Touch" ecological reserve was created at the same time. The park spans 4 habitats (rocky reef, kelp bed, sand flats, and submarine canyon), and it remains a popular place to snorkel and scuba dive.

Warm on Top, Then Warm to the Bottom

Each day, Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Shore Stations Program samples the water by hand at the end of Scripps Pier, once at the surface and once near the bottom at about 5 meters (16 feet). Its surface record runs back to 1916. The samples from August 6 to 31 show the month's other change. Early in the month the surface was warm and the bottom was not. On August 7 the surface read 77.5 degrees Fahrenheit, the warmest sample from August 6 on, while the bottom read 64.9, a gap of 12.6 degrees.

The gap closed as August went on. By August 27 the surface read 76.8 degrees and the bottom 76.6, and on August 31 the 2 samples came in at 75.0 and 74.7. The coolest surface sample in that span, 69.4 degrees, came on August 17.

A Green Finish

The last 3 days were the murkiest of the month. Lifeguards reported the Cove at 10, 5, and 10 feet on August 29, 30, and 31, and the Shores at 5, 4, and 8. The camera's median slid from 15 feet to 11 and then to 9, and no frame on August 30 or 31 graded better than 13 feet. Turbidity at the pier rose to 0.40 NTU on August 30 and 0.55 on August 31, matching the month's high from August 19, with modeled waves near 3 feet.

Orange garibaldi swim in hazy green water beneath Scripps Pier, with only the nearest piling in clear view.

The same camera at 12:18 p.m. PDT on August 30, graded 9 feet. Image: Scripps Pier underwater camera, UC San Diego Coastal Ocean Observing Lab.

Marie's Swell

September began a little clearer than August ended, and then a distant storm sent swell ashore. Marie, downgraded from a tropical storm on the morning of September 1, stayed hundreds of miles southwest of San Diego, according to Fox Weather, but its swell reached Southern California beaches over Labor Day weekend. A National Weather Service high surf advisory ran from Saturday, September 5, through Tuesday night, NBC 7 San Diego reported. Modeled wave height at La Jolla Shores climbed to 4.4 feet on September 5 and 5.2 feet on September 6.

The Shores took the swell hardest. Lifeguards reported 2 feet there on September 6 and 5 feet on September 7, while the Cove held at 8 feet both days. From September 4 through 7, the camera under Scripps Pier graded no frame below 9 feet and none above 15. On September 8, with the surf easing, it graded a frame at 28 feet, and the far pilings under the pier were back in view.

A Note on the Camera Numbers

The camera figures in this recap use distances re-measured on August 31, after an object in the camera's view that had been treated as a piling about 30 feet away was identified as a pipe about 15 feet from the lens. Grades from before that date were recalculated with the corrected distances. The conditions report this site published on August 6, which described camera readings of 28 to 37 feet, used the earlier distances, so its figures run higher than the ones here.

Sources

Clear Start, Green Finish: San Diego Ocean Visibility, August 2026 in Review | Nautical Nick