Sarah joined Julie Thomas from SCCOOS to talk about impacts of the current El Niño on our coastline at the Birch Aquarium’s Perspectives on Ocean Science Lecture Series. There was an excellent turnout and a lot of interest by the community. A brief news clip of the talks is here, a full recording will be available soon.

Our beach walk was a great success! We saw extreme beach erosion, infrastructure damage, and a recently excavated estuary mouth. Astrid Hsu, MAS student at SIO Is studying the efficacy of beach walks and the Urban Tides Citizen Science Initiative, both to figure out who and why people join the Initiative and whether citizens are learning something from their participation. Click … Read More

Join us for a beach walk this Saturday, March 5th 3:30pm at Torrey Pines. We will highlight coastal changes we are experiencing during this El Niño season including cliff and beach erosion and drastic changes to the estuaries. We will also introduce the Urban Tides Initiative, a citizen science initiative intended to document coastline change. The walk will start at … Read More

The Giddings’ lab just returned from the 2016 Ocean Sciences Conference in New Orleans. Isa gave an excellent talk (her first science talk at a major conference, congrats!) and Maddie presented a great poster with exciting new data. This was the view above the poster hall… a sea of posters and ocean scientists!

A fun interview and video highlighting the Giddings’ lab work was published by SIO last week! [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuF8r2nD8_A&w=640&h=360]

Due to receiving a newly funded USC Sea Grant project, we deployed a mooring in Agua Hedionda Lagoon to compare the influence of waves and wave-current interactions on sediment transport in a more open-water type of lagoon. Thanks to the Carlsbad Aquafarm for their help in mooring deployment and the Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute for access to a location to mount our time-lapse … Read More

KPBS joined our beach walk on 20 January 2016 and featured a great story on the radio and on-line about the Urban Tides citizen science program as well as the science many of us at SIO are doing to document El Niño’s impact on our coastline. KPBS has been working on a series of El Niño related stories, also check out … Read More

20 January 2016, Sarah, Maddie & Astrid joined a beach walk on La Jolla Shores to explain extreme water level events, El Niño, sea level rise, and to introduce folks to the Urban Tides citizen science initiative. The Urban Tides Initiative and the walk are led by USC Sea Grant. Astrid Hsu is a Master of Advanced Studies student in Marine … Read More

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.