Transient rip currents, episodic offshore flows from the surf zone to the inner shelf, present a recreational beach hazard and exchange material across the nearshore ocean. The magnitude and offshore extent of transient rip‐current‐induced exchange and its relative importance to other inner shelf exchange processes are poorly understood. Here 120 model simulations with random, normally incident, directionally spread waves spanning a range of beach slopes and wave conditions show that the transient rip current exchange velocity is self‐similar. The nondimensional exchange velocity, surf zone flushing time, and cross‐shore decay length scale are scaled by beach slope and wave properties, depending strongly on wave directional spread. Transient rip‐current‐driven exchange can be compared to other cross‐shelf exchange processes. For example, transient rip‐current‐driven exchange is stronger than wave‐induced Stokes‐drift‐driven exchange up to six surf zone widths from shore.

Moored observations of temperature and current were collected on the inner continental shelf off Point Sal, California, between 9 June and 8 August 2015. The measurements consist of 10 moorings in total: 4 moorings each on the 50- and 30-m isobaths covering a 10-km along-shelf distance and an across-shelf section of moorings on the 50-, 40-, 30-, and 20-m isobaths covering a 5-km distance. Energetic, highly variable, and strongly dissipating transient wave events termed internal tide bores and internal solitary waves (ISWs) dominate the records. Simple models of the bore and ISW space–time behavior are implemented as a temperature match filter to detect events and estimate wave packet parameters as a function of time and mooring position. Wave-derived quantities include 1) group speed and direction; 2) time of arrival, time duration, vertical displacement amplitude, and waves per day; and 3) energy density, energy flux, and propagation loss. In total, over 1000 bore events and over 9000 ISW events were detected providing well-sampled statistical distributions. Statistics of the waves are rather insensitive to position along shelf but change markedly in the across-shelf direction. Two compelling results are 1) that the probability density functions for bore and ISW energy flux are nearly exponential, suggesting the importance of interference and 2) that wave propagation loss is proportional to energy flux, thus giving an exponential decay of energy flux toward shore with an e-folding scale of 2–2.4 km and average dissipation rates for bores and ISWs of 144 and 1.5 W m−1, respectively.

In upwelling regions, wind relaxations lead to poleward propagating warm water plumes that are important to coastal ecosystems. The coastal ocean response to wind relaxation around Pt. Conception, CA is simulated with a Regional Ocean Model (ROMS) forced by realistic surface and lateral boundary conditions including tidal processes. The model reproduces well the statistics of observed subtidal water column temperature and velocity at both outer and inner‐shelf mooring locations throughout the study. A poleward‐propagating plume of Southern California Bight water that increases shelf water temperatures by ≈ 5°C is also reproduced. Modeled plume propagation speed, spatial scales, and flow structure are consistent with a theoretical scaling for coastal buoyant plumes with both surface‐trapped and slope‐controlled dynamics. Plume momentum balances are distinct between the offshore (>30 m depth) region where the plume is surface‐trapped, and onshore of the 30 m isobath (within 5 km from shore) where the plume water mass extends to the bottom and is slope controlled. In the onshore region, bottom stress is important in the alongshore momentum equation and generates vertical vorticity that is an order of magnitude larger than the vorticity in the plume core. Numerical experiments without tidal forcing show that modeled surface temperatures are biased 0.5°C high, potentially affecting plume propagation distance and persistence.