As midday’s high tide neared on Wednesday, pilot Rolf Wallin steered his Cessna 182 Skylane across the many coastlines of Hampton Roads.
The small plane circled from the Southside across the Peninsula and Middle Peninsula, landscapes quickly alternating between urban development, suburban sprawl, beaches, forest and wetlands.
Evidence of high tide was everywhere – water filling marshes, lapping onto boat docks, spilling into streets.
“When you're on the ground, you see it on the road and you're like, ‘Wow, that's a lot of water,’” said Stephanie Letourneau, who manages community science and outreach with the nonprofit Wetlands Watch.
“But when you see it from the sky, and you see it all spread out on our road, on our sidewalks, in somebody's backyard, you get a really good understanding of OK, that's our future coastline.”
This week’s aerial survey was part of efforts by Wetlands Watch and other partners to prepare for the annual Catch the King community science event next weekend. The groups teamed up with Southwings, a nonprofit that facilitates flights for conservation.
Catch the King was launched in 2017 to learn more about the region’s true scale of tidal flooding.
The name refers to the king tide, the highest predicted tides of the year, which happen when the moon, sun and Earth align.
For the 10th year, volunteers will use the Sea Level Rise phone app to map floodwaters while walking their perimeters.
Letourneau said the goal is to get insight into what the future could look like, as sea levels rise.
“Today’s king tides are tomorrow’s new normal.”
The data is used to help validate and ground-truth computer modeling by researchers at William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
Assistant professor Derek Loftis, one of those researchers, said last year that during the past decade, some of Catch the King’s GPS markers have found flooding that didn’t match his initial models.
“The beauty of this is that we’re not only collecting new data and new places that we hadn't previously mapped before, but we're also consistently still mapping a lot of the same places every single year that are giving us enough information to produce these new data-driven models,” Loftis said.
Old Dominion University also leads a companion effort called Measure the Muck. A subset of volunteers go out to flooding sites equipped with coolers, gloves and small bottles to gather water samples.
They’ve found an alarming amount of contaminants in the tidal water, which mixes with all the gunk on land and in sewers. (Reminder: Don’t play in floodwater.)
King tides are an easy way to plan for consistent mapping, but they often don’t turn out to actually be the highest of the year in Hampton Roads.
Last week’s nor’easter, which caused significant tidal flooding, is a good example, Letourneau said.
In fact, she had to cancel one of her planned Catch the King training sessions because of the storm.
Learn more about the event and how to participate on the Wetlands Watch website.
Editor’s note: Derek Aday, director of VIMS and dean of the Batten School of Coastal & Marine Sciences at William & Mary, is a member of WHRO’s Board of Directors. The board is not involved in any editorial decisions.
