A new pilot program at the Delaware Geological Survey seeks to fill in more information about the Delaware coast on Delaware Bay.
The project, which launched in December, has created a network of 10 beach cameras at points from Kitts Hummock to the Cape Henlopen Pier in Lewes. The cameras work together to gather data about an entire beach system, not just individual beaches, and how sand moves around over time.
Speaking at a meeting of the Lewes Economic, Environment and Resiliency Commission, coastal geologist Robin Mattheus, explained the importance of a larger look at beach health.
“You have to look at the system as a whole,” he explained. “Because what a neighboring community is experiencing, while it might not be impacting your community right now, it's part of the same system and environment, and sand is mobile, and you might feel it. It might be a while. It might take some time. There might be a lag, but we don't even really know how interconnected things are from a sand transport perspective.”
The ultimate goal is a deeper understanding of how weather affects communities from a larger perspective.
“The question that we're hoping to address with this pilot study is, how are different communities impacted by the same weather events?” Mattheus said.
Mattheus noted that there are several methods of gathering data, but they all have drawbacks, and the camera network augments those methods to provide a more complete picture of sand transfer.
For example, DNREC does twice-yearly beach profiles. Aerial photography, another way of gathering data, is relatively inexpensive and can show how shorelines move over time, but it doesn’t show sand volume. LiDAR, Light Detection and Ranging, is also aerial. It uses laser technology to map beaches.
“This is very high resolution," Mattheus said. "It creates these dense point clouds of spatial information with very precise locations, we're talking within an inch or so.”
But, he added, LiDAR is also a costly technology and the US Geological Survey only scans this area once or twice every ten years. That leaves a gap the Delaware Geological Survey’s pilot camera network can fill.
“LiDAR is great. If we could get this data on a biannual basis, that would solve a lot of problems, but it's very, very costly,” Mattheus said. “Aerial photos, they're great, very useful for shoreline mapping, but need to be taken with a grain of salt or other information as well. Beach profiling [is] biannual, but how large is your gap between the profile locations?”
DGS’s cameras aren’t the first on First State beaches. The USGS and the Army Corps of Engineers also have camera networks in the area, monitoring the sandbars just offshore. Mattheus says the data they provide are useful.
“If you do this over long enough, maybe the bars are shifting. Maybe rip currents are forming and breaking up the bars. So it's a way of learning about what's in front of your beach and the processes that are shaping that, which ultimately also involves the shoreline to some degree," he said.
Mattheus says the DGS camera network, if the pilot program proves successful, will add to that data, comparing it to the network of weather stations across the country.
“How accurate are forecasts now compared to 50 years ago, thanks to the NOAA infrastructure?” he explained. “We don't really have that sort of thing for the shoreline.”
If the pilot program continues, Mattheus said he wants to explore the possibility of making the camera images and data available in real time, as well as adding a citizen science component tied to storm events, and looking for, “citizens that wouldn't mind going out before and after when the changes occur and doing some profiling.”
He also floated the idea of holding a series of workshops for coastal communities to talk about the program and the data it collects.
