Visualizing coastal disasters

Nobody really likes to think about coastal disasters...but some of us spend an inordinate time doing just that. We try to calculate risks, develop effective response plans and spread the word to our communities. Its the spreading the word part that can be most difficult. I think there are two reasons for this. First no one really likes to think about disaster - we already covered this - but, unfortunately, it is a necessity. Next, it can be very difficult to imagine the scale of disaster that coastal hazards can generate. Even in the face of a media onslaught related, for example, to Sandy, it can be hard to visualize exactly what is going on, and exactly what the victims are experiencing.

That is exactly why these visualizations put together by ABC News in Australia are valuable - they show in stark terms the power of these extreme coastal events, and the changes they can bring in a matter of hours. These are amongst the simplest tools for understanding change on the coast...and the most powerful. For the first two below they use a very nice scroll over tool that allows you to rapidly go back and forth between the before and after photo...very cool.

Check this one out on Superstorm Sandy

and this one about the March 2011 Tohoku tsunami

and this one, utilizing street view photos from Japan

The Night Time Shoreline

Last night I coordinated an optional field trip for my Peninsula College Introduction to Oceanography class. We met down at the boat ramp on Freshwater Bay, and "tide-pooled" our way along the western edge of the bay. The experience reminded me, again, that I should do this far more often. The night time low tides of winter are so much better than the day-time low tides of summer - organisms are out in the open, doing their thing, without having to worry about dessication. In particular I was startled by how many fish and soft-bodied invertebrates we saw. Hopefully some photos and student accounts will follow here...

We didn't focus so much on ID last night as simply trying to grasp distribution and diversity, but a good simple reference for the Salish Sea is the Beachwatchers program online guide book. My students asked for a list of species that we observed though, and while this list isn't complete and is based off of my own sometimes shaky ID skills (and is therefore not necessarily accurate in some cases - let me know if you see errors) it includes:

Fish "Tidepool" sculpins (Oligocottus sp.) at least a few Gunnel species (Pholis sp.) at least one other gunnel (Apodicthys sp.) Northern Clingfish (Gobiesox maeandricus)

Echinoderms Brooding Star (Leptasterias hexactis) Sunflower Star (Pycnopodia helianthoides) Rainbow Star (Orthasterias koehieri) Ochre Star (Pisaster ochraceus) Green Urchin (Stronglyocentrotus droebachiensis; this is a probable ID as it was a juvenile)

Crustaceans Kelp Crab (Pugettia producta) Red Rock Crab (Cancer productus; including females with eggs) Pygmy Rock Crab (Cancer oregonensis) Acorn barnacle (Balanus glandula) Thatched barnacle (Semibalanus cariosus) Rockweed Isopod (Idotea wosnesenskii) Helmet Crab (Telmessus cheiragonus) Hermit crabs (Pagarus sp.) Porcelain crab (Petrolisthes eriomerus) Shore crab (Hemigraspus sp.) A decorator crab species (perhaps Scyra sp.?) Broken back shrimp (Heptacarpus sp.) Other shrimp species (unknown)

Molluscs Black Leather Chiton (Katharina tunicata) Mossy chiton (Mopalia sp.) Mask Limpet (Tectura scutum) Clown Nudibranch (Triopha catlinea) Keyhole limpet (Diadora aspera; the number of keyhole limpets at this site was astounding to me) Mussels (Mytulis sp.) At least two whelks, probably Dogwinkle (Nucella sp.) and perhaps the Dire whelk (Lirabucciumum dirum)

Annelids Calcareous tube worms (Family Serpulidae) Sphaghetti worms (big ones! Order Terebellidae)

Tsunami Strike! Port Angeles (not) inundated

Compared to the "perfect" storm brewing on the east coast, the 7.7 quake that hit off of the coast of Haida Gwaii this weekend has received only limited attention. The West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center issued a tsunami warning for the northern part of B.C. and some of Alaska 30 minutes after the 8:04PM earthquake. By 1009PM, the alert had been extended as a "warning" for parts of Hawaii, and then at 1044PM, the alert had been extended at an "advisory level" for parts of the California coast (see this page for a description of the 4-tier tsunami alert system). The coast of Washington in general (including the Pacific Ocean and Strait of Juan de Fuca coasts of the Olympic Peninsula) were only included in the center's alerts at a "for information only" status.

But we did get "hit"...check out these water level data from the NOAA tidal gauge in Port Angeles Harbor:

A wave train of successive ~6 inch waves every 15 minutes for close to 8 hours, starting in earnest around 11pm on Saturday. Clearly, this tsunami posed no risk to communities on the Olympic Peninsula, but such an event always gives one pause...are we ready for a worse-case scenario?

There is a clear difference between the two "types" of tsunami we can expect on the Olympic Peninsula. A "local" tsunami would be very obvious, because it would be preceded by an earthquake that would, most likely, be at least strong enough to knock us off of our feet. Our tsunami warning system for such an event is built-in...if you are knocked off your feet then, if you are able, get to high ground as soon as possible after you can stand up again. For low-lying communities, or parts of communities, the planning that needs to happen is around escape routes, knowing who and where the young and infirm are, and mobilizing resources to get everyone to safety. Distant tsunamis, which are generated far enough away that we can't feel the earthquake associated with their formation, can still be powerful enough to cause damage. For the purposes of planning for inundation, no distinction is drawn between local and distant tsunamis. we have a set of warning systems in place that are worth looking into. Many centralized communities (i.e. Port Angeles, Lower Elwha, Neah Bay, La Push)have tsunami horns in place which are plenty loud to wake everyone up in the event of a tsunami warning. For homeowners who live away from those central areas, there are a series of alternate warning sources that would be put into service in the event of a tsunami warning covering our coast:

1) The Emergency Notification System. Homes can be directly called over their landlines and notified of emergencies of any kind. This system works only with landlines.

2) As of approximately spring 2013, Clallam County will add a new system that individuals can enroll in, which will route an emergency call to any phone (including cell phones/work phones, etc.) entered into the system.

3) Clallam County uses the alert system at Nixle.com to notify subscribers to any community-relevant alerts. A text is sent to your mobile phone...enrolling is free and easy (it took me about one minute).

4) And finally, the old stand-by...Clallam County Sheriff personnel, fire departments, or even the Coast Guard can all be used to directly canvas communities at risk. So, in the event of a tsunami warning, you could get a knock on your door from the sherriff...

Fun with HOBOs

We use HOBOs extensively for our work in the Elwha coastal zone, and I have become a huge fan of these relatively inexpensive but robust little devices. They are inexpensive enough that when I was starting to plan for this quarter's Introduction to Oceanography class I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could figure out a way to get students using them to collect oceanographic data.

My relationship with the Feiro Marine Life Center (I am on their board) paid dividends immediately. I mentioned my desire to build oceanographic "moorings" with students in my class to the FMLC director, Deb Moriarity, and she suggested that we might be able to use a bit of funds that the FMLC and the North Olympic Peninsula Skills Center Natural Resources program (via Dan Lieberman and Tara Morrow) were granted to enhance educational opportunities in the marine sciences for local students. I had a number of local students in my course and they also wanted to create connections with colleges. Perfect! To really do it right though, I needed a few more HOBOs, and I was able to get them simply by making a request of Onset, the company that manufacturers HOBOs. They were fantastic, and quickly donated four additional sensors in support of this education project.

a student engineered mount...for temperature and light measurements on the bottom...

What do HOBOs add? With my class we've taken temperature and salinity measurements off of the P.A. Pier. That was a great exercise, especially because many of my students had never before used any sort of data collection device. We were even able to use a Van Dorn bottle to collect samples from "depth". But single samples are lacking in context - to really start to look at patterns in the ocean we need to collect data in time and space. Usually the instruments to do this are prohibitively expensive or difficult to use, but HOBOs are relatively cheap and very easy to use. So I developed an activity in which my students would build three "oceanographic moorings" with multiple HOBOs on each mooring, deploy them off of the pier, recover them and analyze the temperature and light intensity data that they log every 30 minutes.

a mid-depth sensor. The engineering challenge was to mount the HOBO such that its light sensor is always pointed up towards the sky.

The HOBOs arrived in the mail Thursday morning, and by Thursday afternoon the students from my class had built simple moorings and had them in the water. The feedback was great and students seemed to love the exercise of trying to work out how to best mount and deploy the HOBOs to maximize data quality. This was an element that I had hoped for...if my interest was only in time-series data for my students to look at I could get it off of the NANOOS or NOAA NDBC websites. But the process of building and deploying the moorings was instructive in and of itself. Students had to think about tides and currents and how they might influence their moorings. They had to think about the various sources of energy in shallow water and build a durable enough system to withstand at least a week in the water.

A gentle deployment off of the pier

So they are in the water now...check them out:

There will be more to come as we recover and analyze our data. And once more, I can't thank the FMLC, the North Olympic Peninsula Skills Center Natural Resources program and Onset enough for their contributions.

in the water...if you see them please don't take them home...

Possibly the coolest beach clean-up video you will ever see

Beach clean-ups are not necessarily known for being a really exciting activity - we do them because we have to, because the state of the beach demands it at times. This video, though, begs to differ. Filmed and edited by Dave Forcucci this video documents a Surfrider Foundation (Olympic Peninsula Chapter) clean-up of a remote Olympic Peninsula beach on Makah land. Hiking stuff out of this beach would be a pain, so the US Coast Guard go involved...check it out:

Sea Level Rise on the West Coast

Sea level rise on the west coast is, deservedly, a topic that is getting a lot of attention these days, especially from those responsible for big coastal cities like Seattle and Vancouver BC. Also not surprisingly there are researchers focused on developing projections of sea level rise on a global scale and regional scale, who publish papers on their results. Then, every few years, some big multi-researcher effort will come along that takes all of the research and all of the papers and attempts to come up with a "we-all-agree-on-this" estimate that can be taken as representing the best available collective science. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is one of those massive global-scale consolidators of sea-level projections derived from researchers working all over the world. The Fourth Assessment Report, published in 2007, included projections of sea level rise (on the order of UP TO 60 cm by 2100) that, based on research published in the late 2000's, seemed too low. In fact, I draw exactly that conclusion in an assessment currently in development for the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.

Now, additional evidence to support that conclusion comes with the publication of the National Academy of Sciences report on sea level rise for the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington. In it, the cast of researchers involved (and the list is long), agree that sea level rise by 2100 may be more extreme than previously thought (on the order of UP TO 1.4 m by 2100). Here is Dr. Gary Griggs (who just happens to be my academic adviser from UC Santa Cruz) summarizing the conclusions:

These new projections are invaluable, because they incorporate the research from the end of the 2000's that suggests that the IPCC projections are too low. The one thing that I think is potentially of concern for those of us working in the Pacific Northwest, though, is the focus on deriving relative sea level estimates (they call them "regional" sea level rise projections in the report). Relative sea level takes the change in sea level due to ocean temperature changes, expansion of sea water, and added ocean water volume due to ice melt, and incorporates "vertical land movement" to come up with an estimate of sea level change relative to the elevation of the land. This is important, since "relative" sea level is what matters for communities planning for a changing sea level. For example, even if "eustatic" sea level (the "true" change in the level of the sea away from land) rises 1.0 m in 100 years, the relative sea level will be much greater in a place like New Orleans, where the land is subsiding, than in a place like Kodiak, Alaska, where the land is rising.

The projections presented by Gary in the summary, which are also featured in the executive summary and elsewhere in the report, are relative and attempt to take vertical land movement into account. This is conceptually okay, but there is an assumption in Dr. Griggs' summary that the entire coast north of Cape Mendicino is uplifting at about the same rate. The evidence suggests, though, that there is quite a bit of variability in rates of vertical land movement around the Pacific Northwest (see also this reference on the topic). In other words, the relative sea level projections offered by the NAS should be used cautiously in the Pacific Northwest since, for a particular community, they may really underestimate the likely sea level over the next 100 years. Instead, we need to take their updated projections of eustatic sea level rise and combine them with community-scale estimates of vertical land movement to really come up with useful projections for cities and communities to work with.

Regardless of that small oversight on the part of the NAS, Gary's final conclusion is dead-on: "Coastal communities need to begin to understand these processes and what sea-level rise indicates for them, and plan accordingly"

More than you ever wanted to know about the Elwha...in four short videos

A few online videos have been published recently that I wanted to push, all focused in one way or the other on Elwha research. the first two are from the Elwha Science Symposium. The opening night of the symposium was held at Peninsula College and was free and open to the public. It featured Lynda Mapes, Jeff Duda and John Gussman...

Elwha Science Symposium - Monday Night Public Event from Peninsula College on Vimeo.

Then on Wednesday a panel of selected researchers, each representing a discipline, presented:

Elwha Science Symposium - Wednesday Science Forum from Peninsula College on Vimeo.

and this one is a recording of me speaking on the coastal response to the dam removal at the Science Cafe event in Tacoma in June. These events are awesome...it was a true delight to give a full-on nerd talk with a beer in my hand.

And finally, a nice little synopsis video assembled by USGS of the Elwha sub-tidal monitoring program: