8/4/2016- VISUALIZING GLOBAL NATURAL DISASTERS

Now that the hurricane season is here, is a good idea to check the national hurricane center in case you are planning any travelling in certain parts of the world. We also have numerous news of flash floods and flooding events all around the planet and if you are paying attention, these are very frequent.

To help prepare and/or visualize worldwide natural catastrophes, there are currently several websites you can use, most of them based on Google maps, some still beta, and most of them including tectonic plates-which makes perfect sense to geologists-. I have included a few here.

-The National Association of Radio Distress-Signalling and Infocommunications (RSOE) operates Emergency and Disaster Information Service (EDIS) within the frame of his own web site which has the objective to monitor and document all the events on Earth which may cause disaster or emergency.

-The NOAA viewer website is also useful to point out how active the Ring of Fire is. Also, their billion-dollar weather and climate disaster map is very telling as well –see image on the left-.

-Another resource that is very useful is the information from insurance companies. An example of the losses of 2015 is below, from artemis.

As you can see, catastrophes are everywhere and that is why we will be exploring all these in the Fall during our Geol9 course at MPC.

Should be fun.

Buckle up-

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php

http://www.disaster-report.com/2016/01/major-natural-disasters-2016-plus.html

http://earthalerts.manyjourneys.com/web/

http://maps.ngdc.noaa.gov/viewers/hazards/

Open Registration for Central Coast GIS Day 2016: November 16th

      Discovering the World through GIS

GIS Day provides an international forum for users of geographic information systems (GIS) technology to demonstrate real-world applications that are making a difference in our society…join us this November 16^th!!

Free Conference in the Central Coast: Details here: http://www.ccjdc.org/events/gisday2016

Sponsored by:

FREE SCREENING in CARMEL TODAY: RACING EXTINCTION

CARMEL UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT TOGETHER WITHNOAA’S OFFICE OF NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARIESINVITE YOU TO A FREE SCREENING

From the Academy Awards Winning Filmmakers of The Cove: 

WHAT:  Students and community members are invited to a FREE film screening of the groundbreaking documentary Racing Extinction.  The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with special guests Joe Morris - Founder/Owner Morris Grassfed Beef; George Matsumoto - Senior Education and Research Specialist, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute; and William Douros - Regional Director, West Coast Region, Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. 

WHO: NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries and Carmel Unified School District

WHEN: Friday, May 20, 7- 9 pm.  Doors open at 6:30.

WHERE: Carmel High School Performing Arts Center, Highway 1 and Ocean Ave, Carmel.For more information, contact Seaberry Nachbar- 240-472-9892

Watch Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwxyrLUdcss

5/1/16: COASTAL HAZARDS IN THE US

When I think about coastal erosion, I think about Pacifica, CA (photo below from coastalcare.org). After a declaration of a state of emergency in January after El Niño related storms, the news in February about yet another chunk of sandy cliff falling into the ocean and houses in need of abandonment was not new. A drone video of the area is clear. A lot of information can be found about how in a few years the cliff has eroded.

Recently two online portals have been developed as an interactive tool for any user to explore what coastal hazards are all about. Also, the National Assessment of Coastal Change Hazards of the USGS has very good information about coastal issues in the country.

The NOAA’s Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts (v. 2.0) website let you browse over possible scenarios of sea level rise and coast vulnerability. A great link to try!

Today I am going to focus on another link, the USGS Coastal Change Portal. The USGS Coastal Change Hazards Portal is a new tool that allows anyone to explore how coasts change due to: extreme storms, shoreline change, and sea level rise.

Extreme Storms: this allows ‘real-time and scenario-based predictions of storm-induced coastal change, as well as the supporting data, are provided to support management of coastal infrastructure, resources, and safety.’ For example, let’s focus on the Gulf Coast and a scenario of a hurricane (any category). Let’s see how a Cat 1 and a Cat 5 possibly looks like (with probabilities of collision (dune erosion), overwash, and inundation for sandy beaches along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts during a generalized hurricane landfall): see figures for both. The most probable areas should be risks areas and treated as such in an emergency.

Shoreline Change: this shows: ‘historical shoreline positions and rates of change along ocean shorelines of the United States’. Looking into the East coast now, offshore Norfolk, see figures for long-term coastal change rates, and for the short-term rates (<30 years rates of shoreline change for open-ocean shorelines of the United States ranging from 1970's to 2001).

Sea level Rise: there are two methods used to address this: a Coastal Vulnerability Index (CVI), and a probabilistic assessment of shoreline change. 

CVI: ‘a preliminary overview, at a National scale, of the relative susceptibility of the Nation's coast to sea-level rise through the use of CVI. This classification is based upon the following variables: geomorphology, regional coastal slope, tide range, wave height, relative sea-level rise and shoreline erosion and accretion rates. The combination of these variables and the association of these variables to each other furnish a broad overview of regions where physical changes are likely to occur due to sea-level rise’. A quick image shown here shows how much red (very high vulnerability) our California coasts possess.

Probabilities of Shoreline Change: ‘this dataset was used to develop and evaluate the performance of a Bayesian network (BN) that predicts long-term shoreline change associated with sea-level rise. The BN is used to define relationships between driving forces, geologic constraints, and coastal response, which includes observations of local rates of relative sea-level rise, wave height, tide range, geomorphology, coastal slope, and rate of shoreline change. Using this information, the BN is used to make probabilistic predictions of shoreline change in response to different future sea-level rise scenarios’. See same area of CA and look at the area of south San Francisco.

As you can see this new tool will help tremendously to manage areas and to get a broad idea of what is happening on the US coasts.

Explore those links!-

4/10/16: Extreme Weather in the U.S.

This week we are exploring extreme weather events. In the figure from weatherunderground on the right you can see how today in the States there are a few happening, like high wind advisory, severe thunderstorm warning, and fire weather advisory.

Knowing your weather patterns matters. As the climate changes, so will the weather. As an example, January 2016 was the most abnormally warm month ever recorded (NASA, NOAA sources). This winter, areas across the globe experienced a shift in rain patterns due to the natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño. A new NASA visualization of rainfall data shows the various changes in the United States with wetter, wintery conditions in parts of California and across the East Coast.

The visualization below shows the rain accumulation from December 31, 2015 to January 6, 2016 with red patches indicating heavy amounts of rain accumulation over California. During this time an extreme event hit the state causing landslides. Credits: NASA/Goddard/Hal Pierce.

Global patterns like more droughts, more heavy downpours, heat waves, etc. can be linked to extreme weather events (NOAA). NOAA staff says: “The point here is that these events are causing up to billions of dollars of damage. As we see the increasing trends in these metrological and hydrological extremes, as a society we really need to think about how we are going to manage the risk, how we’re going to adapt to these changes in extremes.”

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center provides a variety of information detailing all these extreme weather events. Their yearly maps of U.S. Billion-dollar weather and climate disasters are very informative. We are to alone, the world map of significant climate anomalies in 2015 (figure) is clear.

Interesting times…

Free Workshop: GIS & Mobile Technology (April 26)

Join Us For A Discussion Of GIS And Mobile Technology!

Sponsored by MPC Foundation & AMBAG

CCJDC announces a free workshop event April 26th from 9am-3pm at the Marina Library in Marina, CA. Due to exceptional interest and the exciting technologies being presented, the time for the event has been extended until 3pm.

The workshop will cover applications of GIS for mobile devices. We look forward to having you join the conversation and see demos of mobile technologies utilized locally. Presentations will be followed by a participant-led discussion session, networking opportunities, and a light lunch.

Hope to see you there!

Ana

http://www.ccjdc.org/events/2016/4/26/mobilegisworkshop

AGENDA

8:50	Welcome
9:00-9:30	Talk 1 : Geocortex
9:30-10:00	Talk 2 : Soquel Creek Water District - Field Mapplet Implementation
10:00-10:30	Talk 3 : Santa Cruz County Public Works - Lucity Implementation
10:30-10:45	Break
10:45-11:15	Talk 4 : Anatum Field Solutions - Centimeter Bluetooth GNSS for your Tablet or Smartphone
11:15-11:45	Talk 5 : T4 Demonstration
11:45-12:45	Lunch Break
12:45-13:15	Talk 6 : CSDS - Intro to Trimble R1 & R2 GNSS Receivers and RTX Real Time Correction Service
13:15-13:45	Talk 7 : Scheid Vineyards - Viticultural Technologies: Mobile & Web GIS in Action
13:45-15:30	Solutions Experts Anatum Field Solutions, CSDS, Geocortex, Group Mobile, Lucity, Spatial Wave
15:30	Farewell – See you at GIS Day, Nov. 16th, 2016!

Special Thanks to:

· Santa Cruz County Public Works

· Scheid Vineyards, Inc.

· Soquel Creek Water District

· Spatial Wave

· T4 Spatial

• Anatum Field Solutions
• California Surveying & Drafting Supply, Inc.
• Geocortex
• Group Mobile
• Lucity

3/20/16: LANDSLIDES IN CA

Landslides impact California’s terrain often. These are generally related to precipitation patterns, in particular if there has been previous months of drought conditions. In 1982, a series of landslides near San Francisco killed 33 people and closed the Golden Gate Bridge. A total of 18,000 different landslides took place in the San Francisco Bay Area following a very heavy rain storm (data collected by aerial surveillance in the days following the event). Two fast-moving fronts carrying extremely heavy rain passed through in a 36-hour period, during which the area received an amount of rain equal to half its average annual precipitation. 

Another famous unstable area is La Conchita. A mudslide of 400,000 tons of mud in 2005 killed 10 people. This should not be surprising as the exact same place suffered another hill collapse in 1995, destroying 9 homes. In that occasion, the landslide consisted of 600,000 tons of mud and silt slid 600 feet down a cliff face (see topo map in the figure. Note all houses are built donwlope of a very steep slope...).

The obvious approach is study well the soil in where we put homes and also learn from previous occurrences, understanding that areas that are unstable will continue being so  (La Conchita is not alone; Oso area had been unstable before the 2014 event).  Detailed geologic reports have been made in the past of these places, but the personnel that has the power to act have not followed up/ignored them or have not read them. Gravity always wins. We know better?

After the 2005 disaster, there was an attempt of a $50-million grading project. There were also calls for the county to buy up all the homes through eminent domain and never allow anyone to live there again. It was an idea that came and went, as was the grading project.

There is a USGS page with information on how to identify landslides and what to do if one happens: http://landslides.usgs.gov/learn/prepare.php

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/landslides-kill-33-in-california

http://www.usgs.gov/blogs/features/usgs_top_story/rain-and-landslides-in-california/

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-la-conchita-20150104-story.html#page=1

http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2005/1067/508of05-1067.html

http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~jeff/projects/la_conchita/apcg2001_article/apcg2001_article.html