Coastal Surge Investigations and Climate Change

The   Stone Living Lab   is a  partnership that uses Boston Harbor as a dynamic living laboratory. The main objective is to explore nature-based approaches to help Boston adapt to coastal climate change. 

We hope that this research can help increase the tools available for people like developers and regulators so they can make decisions that prepare Boston’s shorelines for the future in the best way possible

An important component of this work is to engage a wide range of perspectives in contributing to our sustainable future. Community science is a great way to involve members of the public in active areas of scientific research in a hands-on way. Once trained, volunteers can reliably collect valuable data that can be used to inform ongoing studies and refine new research questions.

This is the third of a series of annual projects that will be designed to complement the core research being done out on the harbor islands. This year’s community science project is focused on coastal storm surges and will run from March to December 2023.

Storm surge is an event where a coastal storm causes the water level to rise above the predicted astronomical tide. The winds that generate the storm pushes water towards the shore, often resultant in flooding.

King Tides are especially high tides that exceed the normal astronomical high tide. This happens during a full or new moon occurs while the moon is in its' the position closest to earth.

Understanding storm surge will help us better prepare for climate change. We need to measure both the vertical height of floods, and how far inland the surge reaches horizontally. This can tell us how far water travels during these surge events, and help residents, planners, and decision makers prepare for the future.

The flooding from storm surge and king tides can have intense impacts. Often storm surge cause damage to coastal property, whether that be water damage or physical destruction due to the force of battering waves. Moreover, the force of the surge can erode beaches, cliffs, and roads.

Climate change is anticipated to make powerful episodic storms and their impacts, including storm surges, more frequent and more severe. As sea-levels rise, the extent of flooding is also anticipated to grow. Our team of community science volunteers will help understand today's storm surges so that we can better prepare for those of the future.

A full understanding of storm surges requires both a measurement of the elevation of the surge as well as the extent of its flooding. Cobalt chloride test paper can be used to detect the presence of water. Working with our volunteers, we are co-designing a protocol to collect data about the surge without being present during the storm.

First, we are designing a water-level indicator by placing cobalt chloride strips at half-inch intervals along a ruler (top two images on the right). A PVC pipe with holes drilled at half inch intervals and a elbow fitting at the top will be installed around the ruler so that rain will not impact our results. Three of these indicators will be deployed at each site.

Second, we will put cobalt chloride strips in PVC cages with holes drilled to create a single-point flooding indicator (bottom two images on the right). Volunteers will strategically scatter these cages to see which are flooded during a storm to identify flooded vs. non-flooded areas.

Boston Harbor is home to a variety of beaches, marshes, and other coastal ecosystems of critical importance to local communities. As storm surge intensifies with climate change, understanding the extent of the resultant flooding will help our city better prepare for its impacts.

Working with property owners and volunteers from all around Boston Harbor, we narrowed our selection of sites to five. Explore them in the map below!

Throughout 2023, the team of researchers and volunteers did several test deployments to test and improve the design of the flood sensor equipment. Read about the deployments and their results below.

The volunteer team performed a deployment at four research sites to measure the flood resultant from a King Tide on October 30th, 2023. Below is the results from the horizontal sensors.

During this deployment, the team discovered a new challenge with the vertical indicators. The vertical indicators were allowed to sit for 2 days undisturbed after retrieval to allow the wooden ruler to dry out to be more easily removed from the interior of the sensor. However, some of the cobalt chloride paper also dried out during this time, returning to the blue color of the dry paper. Future deployments will require more timely measurement reading and a change in the design of the interior of the vertical sensors.

For further information about this project or to get involved with other ongoing community science initiatives, visit our website   here   or email communityscience@stonelivinglab.org.