Most of our instruments in the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge and Huntington Harbor were successfully recovered! A few instruments remain to continue our study to assess marsh response to human alterations. This project is in collaboration with the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge, Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach, and Naval Facilities Engineering Command Southwest.

This position is now closed.

Postdoc in oceanic forcing of estuarine exchange at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) Center for Coastal Studies, UCSD, is looking for a postdoctoral scholar to work on an NSF-funded project aiming to improve our understanding of the importance of remote oceanic forcing on estuarine exchange flow across estuarine parameter space. The postdoctoral scholar will be responsible for building upon a series of existing realistic regional numerical models over multiple hindcast years, conducting some semi-idealized simulations, and analyzing estuarine exchange flow across estuarine parameter space. A strong background in oceanography is required and preference will be given to those with significant expertise in numerical modeling. Most of the existing available regional numerical models use the ROMS framework, however, several are spread across different regional hydrodynamic codes (including SCHISM, GETM, SUNTANS, and FVCOM), thus significant experience across different coding languages is desirable. The position will be located at SIO working with Dr. Sarah Giddings, with opportunities to mentor graduate and undergraduate students. Moreover, there will be opportunities for interaction with scientists worldwide who are contributing model output. This particular position and project is entirely focused on numerical modeling, however, there will likely be opportunities to participate in field work within the Giddings laboratory and potentially other groups at SIO. Finally, if desired, the postdoctoral researcher will have the ability to participate in the project’s significant outreach component, including helping to implement and design an interactive visualization tool for numerical simulations. Additional information and application instructions for this postdoctoral position can be found here.

Dr. Arzeno’s paper in GRL on the generation of quasi-biweekly Yanai waves in the equatorial Indian Ocean is now published in early view. This is a really unique paper where Isa has used satellite sea surface height and wind velocity data to assess the characteristics and generation of Yanai waves in the equatorial Indian Ocean. Prior literature used numerical models to investigate these waves and very sparse moorings. Using a technique that Isa optimized we are able to show the full structure of the wave across the Indian Ocean basin and quantify important wave characteristics. This work is a departure from my lab’s typical smaller-scale coastal work and is a testament to Isa’s amazing growth and independence as a scientist. Working on something this different was fun and inspiring for all of us!

As part of a project to assess marsh response to human alterations, over the past few weeks we have deployed a series of moorings in the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge. This project is in collaboration with the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge, Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach, and Naval Facilities Engineering Command Southwest. Doing all of this work socially distanced, chasing break of dawn low tides, and in sinking mud, has been very challenging but things are now all in place!

“Seasonal Changes in Structure and Dynamics in an Urbanized Salt Wedge Estuary” by Maggie McKeon, Alex Horner-Devine, and Sarah Giddings was just published in Estuaries & Coasts. This paper describes hydrographic measurements of a salt-wedge estuary, the Duwamish River Estuary, spanning a 20-fold range in seasonal discharge. The tidal dynamics are well explained by two-layer hydraulic theory, and result in a flood/ebb asymmetry that is modulated seasonally. This is an important result as it suggests that this type of estuary may exhibit a seasonally modulated residual circulation.

“Mechanisms of Mid- to Outer-Shelf Transport of Shoreline-Released Tracers” was just released in the Journal of Physical Oceanography. This paper, led by postdoc Xiaodong Wu, focuses on exchange of a shore-line released tracer from the mid- to outer-shelf. While along-shelf flows are primarily driven by obliquely incident waves, cross-shore flows are are driven by both wind-driven Ekman transport and submesoscale frontal flows. A second paper focusing on the submesoscale fronts is in the works!

“Cross‐Shore Structure of Tidally‐Driven Alongshore Flow over Rough Bathymetry” manuscript published on-line in Journal of Geophysical Research, Oceans! This paper, led by former graduate student Andre Amador, uses autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) data to examine the cross-shore structure of along-shore flow over a coral reef. Transport of heat, mass, and momentum over the inner-shelf impacts coastal distributions of larvae, nutrients, pollutants, and many other constituents. In this paper, AUV data shows a cross-shore structure of along-shore tidal flow that is well described with a simple momentum balance where friction becomes more important with proximity to shore. The paper further is able to estimate the bottom drag and roughness and show that the flow is dominated by longer wavelength roughness features. This paper combines an impressive array of data through a tidal phase average and compares it to a simple theoretical balance.

16 June 2020. Sarah presented a lightning talk on “Red-tide impacts inside estuaries and on oysters” at the SCCOOS red-tide mini symposium. It was a very interesting event to attend to learn the various parameters leading up to the massive red-tide and the significant biogeochemical and biological impacts. Lots more information can be found at the SCCOOS red-tide bulletin.

05 June 2020. Isa successfully defended her PhD remotely via zoom. All in spite of covid19 restrictions and significant social unrest. Her presentation was excellent and the attendance via zoom was phenomenal – over 100 attendees from around the world – a testament to her impressive scientific accomplishments and extended family and friend support network. She will be continuing to work with Geno and Sarah as a postdoc for a couple months before she moves on to a postdoctoral position elsewhere. Dr. Arzeno truly blossomed into an exceptional researcher during her PhD, leading numerous field campaigns to the Seychelles and tackling a topic well beyond her advisors’ expertise with a variety of tools ranging from Satellite data to numerical model output to analytical models. Congratulations Dr. Isa Arzeno!!!

08-18 May 2020. A massive red-tide in our region prompted our lab to conduct rapid-response field work, applying for and gaining permissions to conduct limited field equipment swaps during these severely restricted covid19 times. We practiced careful social distancing and sanitizing measures throughout. We were able to swap our biosensor moorings, download the data, and re-deploy to capture the start and end of the red-tide and the response within Los Peñasquitos Lagoon. In addition to the striking bioluminescence, the bloom brought with it widespread hypoxia and fish and invertebrate kills. Greg Boyd was irreplaceable during this work, he single-handedly (due to covid restrictions) performed the bulk of the actual recoveries and deployments!

25 March 2020 – Sarah participated as a panel member in the MPOWIR webinar discussion on Leading People and Projects. MPOWIR = Mentoring Physical Oceanography Women to Increase Retention is a community-based program providing mentoring and workshops for junior physical oceanographers (late graduate school through early career) aiming to reduce barriers to career development for all junior physical oceanography scientists.

31 January – 03 March 2020 Duncan led an intensive field experiment to look at IG wave propagation into Los Peñasquitos Lagoon. He deployed a large suite of instruments within a small area near the lagoon mouth to assess wave propagation and influences on other parameters of interest.

17-21 February 2020. All members of the Giddings lab attended and presented at the 2020 Ocean Sciences Meeting, held in our hometown of San Diego! Sarah was a session chair of the Dynamics of Buoyancy-Driven Flows in Estuaries, Continental Shelves, and Polar Seas session and an invited speaker for a Town Hall on US/Mexico border pollution issues IOOS/SCCOOS partnerships. Maddie, Alma, Isa, Sarah, Duncan, Angelica, Xiaodong, Lauren, and several others working with the group presented talks and posters on their research.

As part of a new NSF-funded project, I am collaborating with coPIs Geno Pawlak (UCSD), Kristen Davis (UCI) and Rachel Collin (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute) to examine the physical processes impacting the formation and breakdown of hypoxia in a tropical estuary. Our field site is Bocas del Toro, Panama, an enclosed tropical bay that experiences seasonal and intermittent hypoxia. During January 2020 several of us went to help graduate student Annie Adelson recover, download, reprogram, and redeploy a large mooring array in the bay. Annie spent five months during 2019-2020 living as a Smithsonian Institution Fellow at the STRI Bocas del Toro Research station. It was an intense but successful field campaign!

A recent paper in Estuaries & Coasts by graduate student Maddie Harvey investigates the “Effects of Elevated Sea Levels and Waves on Southern California Estuaries During the 2015–2016 El Niño.” The 2015-2016 El Niño resulted in larger waves and water levels along with lower than usual precipitation along the Southern California coastline. This allowed for an opportunity to investigate estuarine response to these types of extreme forcing conditions, which may be expected under future climate scenarios. Collaborations with multiple co-authors resulted in comparing observations from 13 Southern California estuaries. Important results of this paper highlight the different response of intermittently closed estuaries relative to perennially open estuaries. Intermittently closed estuaries experienced enhanced higher-high water levels during large wave events, and tides were truncated during low tide due to a sill at the estuary mouth. The overall number and length of closures were increased during the 2015–2016 El Niño relative to a typical year.

These positions are now closed.

Postdoc in small plume/surfzone interactions at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) Center for Coastal Studies, UCSD, is looking for a postdoctoral scholar to work on an NSF-funded project aiming to improve our understanding of the fate of small river plumes as they interact with the surfzone. This work has direct relevance to coastal transport of environmental constituents ranging from larvae to pollution. The postdoctoral scholar will be responsible for collecting and analyzing field observations, and helping to run/analyze realistic coupled numerical simulations at the interface of small buoyant plumes and the surfzone. A strong background in physical oceanography is required and preference will be given to those with expertise in coastal dynamics with both observational and modeling experience. The position will be located at SIO working with Dr. Sarah Giddings, with opportunities to mentor graduate and undergraduate students and work with co-PIs and colleagues at UW and SIO. Additional information and application instructions for this postdoctoral position can be found here.

Postdoc in Predicting coastal water quality, USCRP Topic #3, Understanding the crossroads of human and ecosystem health

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) Center for Coastal Studies, UCSD, is looking for a postdoctoral scholar to work on a USCRP-funded project aiming to improve our understanding of the transport of polluted waters along the coastline. The postdoctoral scholar will be responsible for building upon an existing realistic regional numerical model to incorporate the transport of tracers representative of pollutants within the ROMS/COAWST framework. This will include testing decay rates for tracers, building and testing an open-source ROMS module with various pollutant tracer models to represent a range of pollutants, testing the sensitivity of pollutant “behavior” for predicted water quality conditions, and generating an ensemble of parameter space to simplify coastal water quality predictions. A strong background in oceanography is required and preference will be given to those with significant expertise in numerical modeling, particularly ROMS. The position will be located at SIO working with Drs. Sarah Giddings, Falk Feddersen, and Kate Ricke, with opportunities to mentor graduate and undergraduate students and work with colleagues at SIO and UCSD. Moreover, there will be opportunities for interaction with USCRP program managers, outreach, and stakeholder engagement on coastal pollution issues. Additional information and application instructions for this postdoctoral position can be found here.

25 – 26 November 2019 – We deployed hydrodynamic & biosensor moorings in Los Peñasquitos Lagoon as part of our NOAA NCCOS Coastal Hypoxia Research Program (CHRP) field experiments. Unfortunately our Tijuana Estuary deployments have been postponed due to poor water quality conditions. This work was recently featured by KPBS!

14 – 22 November 2019 – We have been preparing for our NOAA NCCOS Coastal Hypoxia Research Program (CHRP) field deployments. This includes gathering oysters from our field sites, attaching biosensors to them, programming hydrodynamic instruments, and preparing moorings. Prior test deployments with an undergraduate research team were highlighted here. Now we are collaborating with Dr. Luke Miller and MS student Gabby Kalbach from SDSU using their sensor packages. This work was recently featured by KPBS!

06 November 2019 – We have a new Dr! Dr. Madeleine Harvey defended her dissertation on November 6th and submitted all paperwork at the end of November so that she is now officially a Dr. Congratulations Maddie!!! Amazing work pulling together a truly unique set of estuarine measurements and a beautifully done presentation. Maddie will be sticking around the lab for another couple months after which she will be headed off to Rhode Island where she will be starting at NUWC.

06 September 2019 – Sarah presented at the Flood Management Association (FMA) annual conference field tour of the Tijuana Estuary. Topics included estuarine flooding risk from both upstream and the ocean and the interactions with estuarine health and coastal water pollution.

22 July 22 – 23 August 2019 – New PhD student Duncan Wheeler attended the Estuarine and Coastal Fluid Dynamics course this summer at UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories. This 5-week intensive course is led by Dr. Parker MacCready (UW) and Dr. Rocky Geyer (WHOI) and is a crash course in estuarine and coastal dynamics including not only lectures but also hands-on field work and group projects. Sarah was fortunate to be invited as a guest lecturer during the last week of the course (19-23 August). She presented lectures on surfzone dynamics and the interaction of waves within estuaries and with estuarine outflows. She lucked out attending the last week as she got to see the impressive final student presentations – full field experiments and analysis in 5 weeks!!

07 August, 2019 – presentation at the Tijuana Estuary Research Symposium. We presented our NOAA NCCOS CHRP project results to date at this interdisciplinary research symposium hosted by the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve (TRNERR). Scientists, engineers, and managers shared related projects and we discussed management needs and triggers for ecological and estuarine health.

06 August 2019 – NOAA NCCOS Coastal Hypoxia Research Program (CHRP) program manager Kimberly Puglise met with our team to discuss our project and visited one of our two field sites, Los Peñasquitos Lagoon. The project is investigating the causes and consequences of hypoxic events in low-inflow estuaries using an interdisciplinary physical-biological approach incorporating both historical and conducting new field observations.

16 – 21 June 2019, Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Coastal Ocean Dynamics. Isa, Angelica, Alma, and Sarah all attended the 2019 GRC on Coastal Ocean Dynamics. It was an excellent conference filled with great talks and lively science discussions. Looking forward to another one in 2 years!

Angelica defended her dissertation on 24 May 2019 and started working as a postdoctoral Researcher with the Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation at SIO in June. On 08 June 2019 we had a lab party for Angelica and on 15 June 2019, Sarah proudly hooded Angelica at the UCSD Graduate Commencement ceremony.

Angelica and Sarah patiently awaiting SIO and Angelica to be called up to the stage!

12 June 2019 Alex Horner-Devine and Jim Thomson’s (UW) graduate student Sam Kastner defended his general exam, he is making great progress towards defending his dissertation! To followup this event, we held a mini symposium at UW on wave-plume interactions on 13 June 2019. Angelica joined us remotely. It was an incredibly fruitful day filled with in-depth discussions about wave-plume interactions, relevant parameter space, measurement and modeling techniques, and more.

Congratulations to Isabella Arzeno! Isa was awarded the prestigious Ford Foundation Dissertation Year Fellowship. Ford Foundation Fellowship programs (administered through the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, & Medicine) aim to increase the diversity of the US college and university faculties by “increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students”. See here for a Ford Foundation 2019 Fellows press release.

01 June 2019 – SIO 176, Observational Physical Oceanography class, Spring 2019, class cruise! Giddings was invited to join Fiamma Straneo’s SIO 176 cruise aboard the R/V Robert Gordon Sproul. The cruise was intended to give the students a taste for field work and to test out the CTDs that they designed and built during the class! It was a beautiful, calm day out on the water and the students really enjoyed experiencing fieldwork first hand. Two of the student-built CTDs collected data and two remained water tight to depths of 50m!

24 May 2019, Angelica successfully defended her PhD, congratulations to the new Doctor!!!

Come learn about the CSIDE project and some of Sarah and the lab’s work as it pertains to coastal pollution transport and estuarine/coastal exchange at the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve (TRNERR) speaker series! The talk is Saturday 20 April, 2019 starting at 10am at the TRNERR reserve, for more information please see the TRNERR event information and flyer.

Free Walks & Talks

On 02 April 2019 we deployed our first prototype oyster biosensors which will measure shell gape at the same time as we are measuring the hydrodynamic and oxygen conditions. The deployment itself required some last minute MacGyvering, but we got it done! The estuary mouth started to close on 12 August 2019 in response to large waves the prior night, and is currently completely closed and filling in with fresher water from upstream. We returned yesterday, 16 April 2019 to swap out the biosensor battery and SD card to capture data over the closure. A first quick look at the first week of data looks good! More information on this project and the undergraduate research here!

Our lab participated in the 2019 San Diego Climate Summit on March 26, 2019. Sarah gave a talk on estuarine response to shoreline change and Angelica and Maddie set up a table and presented our work to interested attendees. We forgot to take photos, but some should be coming soon on the summit website!

A weary set of travelers returned from the Seychelles yesterday. This trip marked the 7th trip our SLOMO group has completed! As usual, we recovered instrumentation and met with local agencies. A departure from usual – some of our longer-term moorings were not-redeployed. However we did still redeploy several instruments around Mahé. Isa is busily plugging away at her ongoing analysis of dynamics around and atop the plateau, while new postdoctoral scholar, Alma is working to write a summary paper of the dynamics atop the plateau.

Graduate student Isabella Arzeno just published the first chapter of her dissertation on examining the dynamics over coral reefs. While prior dynamical studies over coral reefs have predominantly focused on cross‐reef dynamics, this manuscript examines the along-shore dynamics. This is done through using observations of a Hawaiian fringing reef system to quantify the dominant terms in the depth‐averaged alongshore momentum budget as a function of tidal phase. Importantly, while the canonical balance is important, the observations also suggest the importance of advective acceleration at one of the sites – a term often ignored.

With an El Niño watch ongoing this winter, this recent publication with lead author Adam Young looks back at the 2015-2016 El Niño response along the Southern California coastline, particularly focusing on the morphodynamic changes (erosion/accretion) seen along our beaches, estuaries, and cliffs. Key findings are that the coastal change is highly variable spatially with some regions showing erosion, some showing accretion, and the average being moderate erosion. The relatively moderate response is attributed to the wave angle and the coastline shape sheltering Southern California from the largest waves, minimal rainfall, and the fortunate asynchronous timing of the largest waves and largest tides. Investigating how the 2015-2016 El Niño impacts our coastlines gives us an idea of how our coasts may be affected under future climate scenarios where similar storm tracks and wave angles are predicted.

A new paper highlights some results from our CSIDE study was recently released in the Journal of Physical Oceangraphy. “Cross-Shore Deformation of a Surfzone-Released Dye Plume by an Internal Tide on the Inner Shelf” led by graduate student Derek Grimes, describes 2015 observations of the fate of a dye plume released in the surfzone as it was deformed by an internal tide on the inner-shelf. While this paper focuses on the detailed dynamics over just a few hours, it highlights the importance of the timing of transport from the surfzone relative to the solar cycle and the internal tide on the ultimate fate of surfzone-sourced material.

Graduate student Angelica Rodriguez just published her research results in Geophysical Research Letters (with co-authors Giddings and Kumar (UW)) and is highlighted in the Scripps news. The paper, “Impacts of Nearshore Wave‐Current Interaction on Transport and Mixing of Small‐Scale Buoyant Plumes” uses idealized modeling of the interaction between small buoyant plumes (e.g., rivers, creeks, storm drains, etc.) and the surfzone to assess their interaction. Under strong waves and/or small outflows, buoyant outflow plumes were effectively trapped close to the coastline, spreading alongshore instead of cross-shore. This has major implications for transport of pollutants that typically accompany freshwater outflows and can hopefully improve beach water quality sampling and management.

The coupling between plumes and waves has been studied before on large scale plumes, but the interaction between smaller plumes and the surfzone – the region where surface gravity waves break near shore – has been investigated here for the first time. Using an idealized model domain representative of the scales of estuaries and plumes common in Southern California, we coupled a hydrodynamic model (ROMS) with a wave model (SWAN) using the COAWST modeling framework. This modeling framework allowed us to look at wave-current interactions and assess the impact of the surfzone on small buoyant outflows. Importantly, we found that vigorous mixing due to waves in the surfzone vertically mixed the buoyant outflow in the surfzone and wave-driven velocities reduced offshore plume propagation, while enhancing alongshore spreading.

This important question is addressed in a new paper “Expected limits on the ocean acidification buffering potential of a temperate seagrass meadow,” led by David Koweek at the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford. A press-release from the Carnegie Institution and a blog post by David Koweek do an excellent job summarizing the paper in detail.

This paper is the culmination of an interdisciplinary collaboration amongst seagrass ecologists, chemists, climate scientists, and physicists to address the buffering potential of seagrass meadows against ocean acidification, a critical topic as we face a changing climate. We employed a numerical box model coupled with hydrodynamics and a complex bio-geochemical seagrass/chemistry model to investigate the ability for an estuarine seagrass meadow to buffer the acidity of incoming oceanic water (i.e., to counteract ocean acidification). Overall, buffering capacity was found to be relatively weak, about equivalent to turning back the clock a few decades, which is a small offset to the 150 years of ocean acidification that has already occurred and is worsening. Thus the results suggest that while buffering does occur, it is not enough for long-term ocean acidification mitigation. However, there were brief periods of time when buffering capacity was high; that coupled with new information about how organisms can adapt to changing environments, as well as other potential mitigation approaches, provide potential opportunities to use seagrass as part of a broader strategy to ameliorate local ocean acidification in estuaries. The model for this work was parameterized specifically to Tomales Bay, a northern California large estuary, however the resulting publicly available box-model is designed so that it can be tested under varying conditions.

This work is a contribution of the Seagrass Ocean Acidification Amelioration Workshop of the Bodega Marine Laboratory, financial support for which was provided by California Sea Grant and the Coastal & Marine Sciences Institute of the University of California, Davis. Partial support was provided by the National Science Foundation.

This summer Alex Makic and Adrian Urrea have been working in the lab as undergraduate researchers.

Alex, from Colorado College, majoring in Physics with an Emphasis in Environmental Science, worked for a month in the lab on helping to analyze drone imagery taken above Los Penasquitos Lagoon and adjacent beaches to examine morphological changes over time as part of a California Division of Boating & Waterways funded project. He returns to college in early August, but has already made excellent progress this summer! In addition to working with us, he also worked with Octavio Aburto’s lab assessing Mangrove habitats in Baja California.

Adrian was part of a team of students who worked with Jeff Crooks and I during the 2018 Spring quarter to develop a bio-sensor. Adrian has continued to work in the lab this summer, further developing the sensor which will measure oyster shell gape to study how they respond to surrounding conditions. He is working to improve the sensor, add components (temperature and heart-rate sensors), finalize its calibration, run a field test, and build more of them!

18 – 21 June 2018, Giddings attended and presented at the NSF sponsored Workshop on the future of coastal and estuarine modeling. Presentations ranged from numerical discretization schemes, to nonhydrostatic versus hydrostatic code, to the state of the art in wave model-hydrodynamic model coupling. It was a very interesting several days discussing where we are in coastal and estuarine modeling and what are the major hurdles as well as opportunities ahead.

13 June 2018 – The EPA hosted a kickoff meeting for two new Border 2020 funded projects aiming to reduce coastal water pollution along the US/Mexico Pacific border. Falk Feddersen and Sarah Giddings presented an introduction to their recently funded Border 2020 Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC) project entitled: “Evaluating the 2017 Tijuana River Estuary cross-border wastewater spill sources and coastal impacts.” This work builds off of modeling work started during the CSIDE project, but is heavily focused on the applied aspects of this research, specifically understanding the sources and impacts from a particularly large spill that resulted in extended beach closures in early 2017. We got great feedback from stakeholders (government agencies, public, other research groups, nonprofits, etc.) and also heard more about a complimentary observational project SCCWRP is leading under the same grant program.

12 June 2018, Students completing the Master of Advanced Studies in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation presented their capstone projects at the Annual Capstone Symposium. Kelsey Miller, who Giddings has been working with over the Winter and Spring quarters 2018, presented her project: Tribal Intertidal Digital Ecological Survey (TIDES) Project: A Conservation Technology Partnership with Coastal Indigenous Nations Advisors: Dr. Jennifer E. Smith (Chair), Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Dr. Sarah N. Giddings, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Megan Van Pelt, Natural Resources Department, Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation; Clinton B. Edwards, Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Kelsey did an amazing job with the work and the presentation.

Forgot to take pictures, but we all went out to lunch as a lab to welcome Alma Castillo Trujillo for a short visit who will be joining the lab in September 2018 as a postdoc. Great to have such a wonderful group of people!!

For their senior design course in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (MAE126b) a group of undergraduates decided to work with Dr. Jeff Crooks (Tijuana National Estuarine Research Reserve Research Coordinator) and Dr. Sarah Giddings to design biosensors for oysters. During just one quarter, team members Adrian Urrea, Hsing-Han (Hans) Chung, Emma Schoenthal, Claudio Coleman, and Marika Hale successfully built a prototype that can measure the shell gape of an oyster!! Photos of their test deployments in the SIO seawater facility (thanks to Phil Zerofski, facility manager) and a link to their project website are here:

16 May 2018 – Tijuana Estuary Tidal Restoration Program (TETRP) meeting. TETRP is a multi-phased restoration for the Tijuana River aimed at restoring habitat through projects such as those aimed to increased tidal flushing. TETRP has already completed two major restorations and Giddings is a science advisor for the most recent phase of the program.

9-23 April 2018 – Nearly 2 m of sand accreted over our pressure sensor buried in the mouth of Los Peñasquitos Lagoon, making it 3 m beneath ground level. After recovering the sensor in the surfzone and attempting to recover the lagoon mouth sensor, we had to resort to heavy machinery. Since the lagoon mouth was in the process of closing, recovery was a priority before the lagoon filled with water and the recovery became impossible. After a couple long days in the field, the pressure sensor was successfully recovered!

Thanks to Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego Publications for some amazing photographs taken on the first day (before the heavy machinery!). And of course thanks to the amazing field crew – could not have done it without the immense efforts of Brian, Kent, Greg, Lucian, Rob, and Bill!

04 April 2018 – Kristen Davis from UC Irvine is leading a big study of Newport Bay and the exchange with the coastal ocean. After a far too exciting day in the field (fear of lost instruments), all moorings were successfully recovered!

23 March 2018 – Giddings was invited to give a talk at the SDSU Computational Science Research Center (CSRC). Meetings with faculty and students during the visit highlighted the amazing work they are doing there and some potentials for future collaboration!

21 March 2018 – Harvey and Giddings participated in a workshop that was part of the Marshes on the Margins project. Marshes on the Margins is investigating how heavily altered Southern California estuaries will be impacted by sea level rise, particularly thinking towards restoration strategies. The workshop was focused on Los Peñasquitos Lagoon as a case study location. Harvey presented the data she has collected and work she has done towards understanding the system as part of her dissertation.

11 – 16 February 2018, Giddings lab members attended the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, Oregon. Arzeno presented an excellent poster, and Harvey & Rodriguez presented talks on their most recent research projects.

During January 2018, we returned to the Seychelles to continue our research there as part of the Seychelles Local Ocean Modeling and Observations (SLOMO) project, a project which is part of the larger ONR funded NASCar project.

Click here for more photos and more about the trip!

05-09 November 2017, Maddie, Angelica, and Sarah attended the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation 2017 conference in Providence Rhode Island. All group members presented talks on their research and we had multiple meetings with collaborators.

PhD student Angelica Rodriguez participated in the Scripps Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program as an undergraduate. This spurred her excitement about research and oceanography and led her to pursue a PhD at Scripps. Her SURF experience is highlighted in the UCSD news.

A paper in Oceanography was recently published highlighting the NASCar (North Arabian Sea Circulation – autonomous research) efforts. It includes a section on our NASCar Seychelles project – Seychelles Local Ocean Modeling and Observations (NASCar – SLOMO). And it highlights several of our photographs from the field, check out Isa, Maddie, Rich,Geno, and others on the cover page!

As one of five major ports in California, San Diego Bay is an important hub for industry and commerce, as well as the  U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet.  The bay consists of nearly 11,000 acres of marine habitat for a diverse aquatic population that helps sustain various fauna that use the bay for breeding, rearing young, and migratory respite.  Among the many organisms that call the bay home are sea turtles and the California Least Tern.  As anthropogenic activities alter the landscape, environmental stresses put on these organisms have changed their migration and foraging patterns.

A collaborative project between SIO and SPAWAR SSC-Pacific is currently underway to improve upon the current understanding of the mechanisms driving San Diego Bay environmental conditions and circulation patterns to asses their role in ecological function of the bay.    By assessing its modern hydrographic state, quantifying flow fields, and contextualizing the physical data with existing biological data, we hope to gain a better understanding of the system as a whole, which will ultimately allow for better stewardship of the resources that the bay provides.

 A key focus of this project is shoal-channel interaction during the time period when the south bay becomes consistently saltier than the ocean (i.e. summertime in San Diego).  This is intended to be a topic in Angelica’s dissertation and her summer internship with SPAWAR through the NREIP.

As part of her dissertation work, Maddie led a large field experiment in Los Peñasquitos Lagoon that just recently wrapped up. In addition to her typical deployments (pressure sensors, current meters, salinity/temperature sensors, etc.) she also deployed a Distributed Temperature Sensor (DTS) which consists of a long cable that can effectively measure temperature at very high spatial resolution. This month-long deployment required going to the lagoon multiple times per week to collect data and check on equipment.

Heitor presented his research in our group at the 2017 UCSD Undergraduate Research Conference and got excellent feedback! Very excited to have him working with us and expanding upon an interactive model visualization tool which we hope to release by this coming summer!!

Heitor presenting at one of our past group meetings x infinity! He had to connect to another computer via video conference in order to present so it resulted in an infinite string of images of himself!

Congratulations to Angelica Rodriguez and Maddie Harvey for passing their qualifying exams! Angelica advanced to candidacy on 21 March 2017 and Maddie advanced to candidacy on 6 December 2017. I am super proud of my students, they are all doing an excellent job! Here they are engulfing Angelica in a hug after her post-quals celebratory lunch!

Yesterday we went out on the Sally Ann to swap the batteries on some offshore instrumentation.  Despite some extremely dense fog that made navigating tricky we made some new friends! Both instruments were playing host to octopi that only left their homes inside the instrument after the instruments were hauled on deck. One octopus decided to make his great escape back to the ocean through the boat’s bilge pump.  Luckily, Kent and Greg were able to save him and put him back in the water!

Madeleine volunteered with the Ocean Discovery Institute’s Wetland Exploration Program to talk to 4th grade students about wetlands and what it is like to be a scientist.

Madeleine speaking with 4th grades students at Emory Cove Ecological Reserve.

Angelica, Isa, and Maddie went out to the lagoon to change out the batteries on our instruments.  We continually measure depth, water velocity, dissolved oxygen, salinity, and temperature in the lagoon.

Giddings and Harvey attended the Intermittenly Open Estuaries: Science & Mangagement Perspectives workshop in LA. Great discussions about these systems, the issues they face, and management approaches. Thanks to the Tijuana National Estuarine Research Reserve and the Wetlands Recovery Project for hosting this great meeting!

Giddings and CSIDE (Cross Surfzone / Innershelf Dye Exchange) graduate student Derek Grimes attended and presented at the International Boundary & Water Commission Citizen’s Forum on 1 September 2016. Grimes showed preliminary results from the CSIDE project which was highlighted in the local news.

the Giddings lab participated in the SIO Block Party, showing examples of extreme water level impacts on our local coastlines. The party was attended by hundreds of interested locals who got to learn about SIO science directly from the researchers. Here Isa flips through one of the flip-books of estuary sediment accretion/erosion created by Maddie and undergraduate researcher Mia Gonzalez.

Urban Tides Initiative citizen science project featured in the USC Sea Grant newsletter along with other wonderful citizen science projects led by USC Sea Grant!

Giddings, Harvey, and undergraduate researcher Mia Gonzalez attended the UC Irvine workshop on California Coastal Resiliency following a meeting with Colleagues at SCCWRP.

The Giddings lab participated in an SIO wide outreach event to students from Upward Bound, a year-round comprehensive academic college preparation and retention program that serves students from North County High Schools. The students were incredibly engaged and excited to witness the gravity currents and play around with stratification! Isa, Angelica, and Maddie, seen in the picture had a great time as well!

Great update on our project posted on the USC Sea Grant website! Thanks to the USC Sea Grant for funding this work looking at El Niño impacts on lagoon circulation and how it serves as a window into future conditions.

Part of the team departed for the Seychelles on 28 May 2016 to recover and re-deploy moorings, carry-out a process-based focus study, and do outreach with the local community. You can follow their trip on our NASCar-SLOMO project website. From left to right, Hugo, Isa, Rich, and Geno.

19 May 2016 Giddings and a few other scientists and policy specialists presented to community members at the City of Carlsbad Sea Level Rise Meeting. The City of Carlsbad hosted a panel discussion and community meeting about “The Future of Carlsbad’s Coast and Lagoons.”

Video, photos, and information from the event can be found here.

On 18-20 May 2016, the Los Peñasquitos lagoon mouth was dredged open following nearly 2 months of continuous closure and upstream flooding. On 19 May 2016 water levels were low enough for us to recover the buried pressure sensor located just inside of the lagoon mouth. This pressure sensor has been measuring wave energy entering the lagoon throughout the El Niño winter.

Now you can watch the lecture on El Niño and Our Urban Ocean by Sarah and Julie Thomas from SCCOOS at the Birch Aquarium’s Perspectives on Ocean Science Lecture Series.

SIO highlights all of the amazing El Niño work that has gone on during this 2015-2016 El Niño season in this article.

We recovered our gear from AHL this week! Rob and Maddie got to dive in the lagoon… visibility was less than an arm’s length! There was significant growth on the instruments but so far the data looks good.

Join Astrid and many others as they highlight the various citizen science projects occurring in San Diego. This will be the inaugural Citizen Science Expo for San Diego! Astrid will highlight the Urban Tides Initiative and Stormphoto citizen science projects which the Giddings lab has participated in and her results from analyzing the efficacy of these programs as part of her SIO MAS (you can read about Astrid’s work and the Urban Tides and Stormphoto initiatives). In addition to an exhibition in the community room featuring local citizen science projects, there will also be citizen science seminars, workshops, games, raffles, and more. This should be a great event to learn how you can get involved in a variety of different citizen science programs that allow you to learn from and help scientists throughout San Diego. Representatives from citizen science programs ranging from the medical field to oceanography to conservation and more will be represented!

The event takes place on 16 April 2016 from 10am-2pm at the La Jolla Public Library. Check out the flier here and find more information on presenters here.

The Tijuana River mouth closed last week in response to what we think are the combined effects of large waves throughout this El Niño season and potentially along-shore transport of sand from earlier beach nourishments. Our colleagues at the Tijuana National Estuarine Research Reserve have been monitoring the situation closely to better understand what is going on. See this news article about some of the unfortunate consequences of this closure combined with significant water quality issues from upstream. A paper by colleagues in the Guza lab should be coming out soon that looks at the beach component of this issue. While several of the smaller estuaries throughout California close more regularly, a closure of this estuary has not occurred since the last major El Niño in 1983.

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.

Maddie explains her research in Los Peñasquitos Lagoon to beach walk participants.

Our beach walk was a great success! We saw extreme beach erosion, infrastructure damage, and a recently excavated estuary mouth.

Participants walk along a very narrow beach with no more sand!

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” below to read preliminary findings of Astrids’ results! And if you want to participate check out the Urban Tides Initiative website (for those that want to use an app and/or on-line program) and the Storm Photo website ( for those who would rather send images via email). More information about El Niño and its effects see here.

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 theTorrey Pines State Reserve South parking lot near the restrooms (directions). From there we will briefly walk south and then head north, passing the mouth of Los Peñasquitos Lagoon and ending near the cliffs north of the lagoon. The walk should take ~1-1.5 hours. Note that a chance of rain and large waves are predicted, so long as it is not pouring, we will do the walk. In the case of very large waves and high water level, we will walk along the roadway rather than the beach. We look forward to seeing you there!

This weekend should be a particularly interesting time to check out the region as it recently experienced a few cliff failures, massive beach erosion, a closed estuary mouth (see above photo), and mechanical breaching of the estuary is expected to occur Friday before our walk. The photo above is from 18 February 2016, shortly after a cobble berm blocked the estuary mouth and the beach access ramp (note the hand rail barely sticking up above the cobbles!).

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 camera!

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 this great one on Bob Guza’s beach monitoring program. Another story highlighting some of the science recently funded related to this El Niño season (including our CA estuary comparisons with SCCWRP ) is available here.

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 Biodiversity and Conservation at SIO interested in science communication and the process of citizen science. She is helping gauge the success of the Urban Tides citizen science program through surveys and web-data analysis.

Linda Chilton of USC Sea Grant leads the beach walk along La Jolla Shores on 20 January 2016

Check out a wonderful blog that Astrid wrote about the beach walk here, and another one here!

Maddie Harvey gave a tour of the SIO pier and Sarah Giddings spoke briefly about sea level rise, El Niño, and what scientists are able to do with the photographic dataset collected via Urban Tides. We are still looking for participants, so please consider joining in this great citizen science project to document changes to our coastline (beaches, estuaries, cliffs, and infrastructure) throughout this winter!

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 + safety vests! Crane in the background is because the railroad bridge over Los Pen is under construction.

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 25 December at Scripps Institution of Oceanography Pier and La Jolla Shores about an hour after the maximum water levels. If you have pictures of extreme high OR low tides, please send them our way via our citizen science efforts! See this page on how to do so and how we will use the images.

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)

view of Mahe, the main island of the Seychelles on an incredibly calm deployment day, 17 December 2015, photo by G. Pawlak

The overarching goal for the research is to develop predictive capabilities for physical oceanography for the Seychelles region in support of locally relevant marine applications while providing context for larger scale NASCar efforts. Our work includes both observations and numerical simulations to identify the primary forcing mechanisms for local oceanography in this complex and relatively under-sampled environment. This work is being done in partnership with local authorities to help guide use of the data and support future observational programs.

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 Dieguito Lagoon to discuss our strategies and installation techniques for instrumentation and sampling.

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 global models. GFDL is one of those modeling centers which includes scientists from NOAA and Princeton, however other modeling centers were represented including NCAR, NOAA NCEP, NASA GISS, GMAO, DOE ACME, and ONR. It was a very interesting and fruitful meeting with a lot of wonderful scientific discussions.

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!

June 7-12 Dr. Giddings and Angelica attended the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Coastal Ocean Modeling. GRCs are intended for a small number of participants to present and discuss new, unpublished research. The environment fosters interaction between senior and junior scientists, as well as graduate students. Sessions are geared toward highlighting the most cutting-edge scientific methods and results while facilitating healthy discussion and debate.

Dr. Giddings gave an invited talk on using numerical models to capture the dynamics of ocean-estuarine interactions. The photo here includes all attendees. Invited speakers who presented on model development and/or application are pictured in the front row, behind the conference Chair and Vice Chair. All other participants presented posters. Angelica’s poster displayed her most recent work on assessing the impact of wave forcing on small river plumes.

Thursday, 12 March, 2015, Angelica (second from right) introduced UCSD Chancellor Emerita Marye Anne Fox

Event organizers and invited speakers. From left to right: Erika McBride, Marye Anne Fox, Ashley Gardner, Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, Cil Pleman, Angelica Gilroy, Paul Memije.

(second from left) at the Navy’s Southwest Regional Maintenance Center (SWRMC) Women’s History Month Event.  SWRMC is the largest and most diverse intermediate maintenance activity. The command provides superior ship maintenance, modernization, and technical support to over 100 surface ships, submarines, shore activities and other commands of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.  Among the event attendees was the commanding officer, engineer, astronaut, diver, and military officer, CAPT Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper (fourth from right).  Other audience members included Engineers, Shipbuilding Specialists, Engineering/ Electronic Technicians, Contract Specialists, Quality Assurance, and Management Analysts.

The event was comprised of slideshows, presentations, and interactive sessions intended to inform the audience of the contributions women have made to societal advancement across multiple disciplines.  SWRMC’s Multi-cultural Committee, headed by Paul Memije (far right), partnered with Cil Pleman (third from right) and Erika McBride (far left) from Commander Pacific Fleet’s Human Resource Office Southwest to bring two distinguished guest speakers to the event: Spokeswoman for the Women’s History Museum of California, Ashley Gardner (third from left), and Dr. Fox.  Each speaker gave both historical perspectives as well as anecdotes from their own intriguing personal experiences.  The event was very well received and all of the audience members admitted to learning something new.  CAPT Stefanyshyn-Piper closed the event by stating that women’s history is not just women’s history—it’s our history.

21 March 2015. Giddings and SIO graduate students Julia, May-Linn, Sasha, Erica, and Shantong, joined with the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve (TRNERR) team to present hands-on experiments to kids and parents at the San Diego Science EXPO Day. It was a fun filled day with exhibitors presenting hands-on STEM experiences ranging from operating and building robots to making concrete. There were even math rap and dance performances! With over 20,000 participants, it was an amazing day of science and fun. The TRNERR group had a demo where kids dug through fake mud cores to search for the various creatures that live in estuary marshes and microscopes to check them out in more detail. While the TRNERR group covered the biology, we covered the physics of estuaries and guided kids in experiments of what happens when river water meets the ocean.