Surfing in the Desert Comes With a Climate Cost

Pickup trucks and SUVs pull into a parking lot, surfboards stashed in the back. Not an unusual sight in Southern California on a hot blue-sky morning in May, except this is the Coachella Valley, about 100 miles inland from the nearest beach. The would-be surfers trek over to an expanse of desert dirt surrounded by a verdant golf course and framed by the snow-capped San Jacinto mountains. Their surfboards are just props for a groundbreaking ceremony, but the spot is set to be submerged under nearly seven million gallons of water. The five-acre lagoon will generate artificial but ocean-like waves shaped by software.

The $236 million project, called DSRT Surf, will also include a hotel, restaurants and private villas. It’s among dozens of similar surf parks either currently operating or under development around the world. Thanks to advances in computational fluid dynamics — the science of how water flows — and the rapidly declining cost of computing power, surfer-entrepreneurs have cracked the code on how to replicate the complex physics of breaking ocean waves.