The lab spent the past two days in the field collecting data for Maddie’s lagoon morphodynamics project. The photo here is from Los Penasquitos Lagoon prior to conducting morphodynamic and hydrodynamic surveys following a series of major storms. The estuary looks very different after those storms. Unfortunately none of our arms are long enough to show our excellent oversized lagoon waders … Read More

Local news station, Fox 5 highlighted the citizen science program for El Niño documentation. Giddings answered a few questions regarding El Niño and its coastal impacts.

Happy holidays and happy extreme tides! Higher than normal tides this year have fallen on the holidays, the last one was at Thanksgiving, this one was on Christmas eve. The extreme tides + higher sea level caused by El Nino + waves led to coastal flooding along Southern California (unfortunately leading to more line un-happy high tides). These pictures are from … Read More

Geno, Sarah, Isa, and Rich spent 10 lovely days in the Seychelles doing field work in December… the first trip of several that is part of the NASCar : SLOMO program. NASCar (The North Arabian Sea Circulation – autonomous research): Seychelles Local Ocean Modeling and Observations (SLOMO) The overarching goal for the research is to develop predictive capabilities for physical oceanography for the … Read More

We began field work to examine estuarine response to extreme events during the El Niño winter season. Extreme events of interest include extreme sea level events caused by tides + waves + surge as well as runoff from storms with rainfall. Photos include instrument checks in August and deployments in November.

As part of a collaboration with SCCWRP (Southern California Coastal Water Research Project), funded by California Sea Grant, we are collaborating with a large group of scientists up and down the CA coastline to examine and compare estuarine response to extreme events that we expect to occur during this 2015-2016 El Niño winter season. 19 November 2015 we met at San … Read More

15-16 October, 2015 Giddings attended the US CLIVAR (Climate Variability and Predictability Program) meeting entitled: Translating Process Understanding to Improve Climate Models held at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (NOAA GFDL). At this meeting Giddings and several other scientist who study oceanic and atmospheric processes gathered with scientists from National modeling centers to discuss how to improve representation of smaller-scale processes in … Read More

Early September we deployed instruments in the Tijuana Estuary as part of the CSIDE (Cross Surfzone/Inner-shelf Dye Exchange) experiment. The dye releases will be on the coast but we would like to better understand the interaction of the nearshore with the estuary. By instrumenting the estuary, we can directly look at nearshore/estuarine connectivity and estuarine dispersion.

Check out the major experiment that the Giddings lab is working on with the Feddersen lab to examine the exchange between the surfzone and a stratified inner-shelf. The experiment prep work is in full gear and preliminary models are up and running!

We had a full afternoon of coastal oceanography science discussions followed by dinner by the beach with (from left) Sarah Giddings, Madeleine Harvey, Angelica Gilroy, Emma Reid, Kristen Davis, and Aryan Safaie. Not pictured are Geno Pawlak and Andre Amador who joined in the conversations as well!