The Giddings Lab is engaged in a collaborative project with the Navy Marine Ecological Consortium to better understand San Diego Bay environmental conditions and circulation patterns, allowing for better stewardship of the resources that the bay provides.
Phase One of the project, executed in 2017 with partial funding from NIWC Pacific through a Naval Research Enterprise Internship and contributions to fieldwork, included repeat surveys and the deployment of a series of moorings used to assess the Bay’s modern hydrographic state and flow fields. The physical data was contextualized with existing biological data and fills knowledge gaps on how the bay system works as a whole.
Phase Two, now underway with funding from NAVFAC SW, involves the deployment of a set of hydrodynamic observations along the San Diego Bay axis in order to assess spatial and temporal variability in the bay’s longitudinal dynamics. The data will measure vertical stratification at multiple points along the bay, providing a metric of the dynamical regimes, and velocity profiles showing temporal variability in the along-channel flow through the tidal cycle and seasons.
In an effort to inform San Diego Bay shoreline protection and adaptation strategies, the Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation at Scripps is collaborating with our lab and Feddersen group to examine the physical processes relevant to flood risk within the bay, including offshore phenomena. See here for more information.