First Results for Tillamook Bay!

It seems as though the end of the Malouf scholarship is drawing nigh and that this will be my last blog post. I’m not quite sure where a year went as it seems just a month ago that I was meeting with Dr. Malouf and the other scholarship recipients, happily discussing our research and the work ahead. That said, from another perspective it seems a lifetime spent over the last year slowly grinding forward. In terms of progress, much of the hard computer modeling work is nearing a close and we are transitioning into the significantly more fun results stage. In this pursuit I am working with Jon Allan at the Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI) to make flood maps for public consumption. There is a wealth of progress to be made in this regard, comparing our results to DOGAMI’s and FEMAS flood maps and tracking down the important processes controlling flooding. It feels like a breath of fresh air to be finally getting close to the answers and (hopefully) community shaping results that I began working on years ago. For a problem of this size it’s sometimes easy to get lost in the little details and forget the big picture and the reason why you are here!

While this part of the project is nearing an end, I am considering it only part one of the story. Many lessons have been learned and part two will incorporate these changes as well as input from communities and stakeholders. The two main points that will be tackled in this new approach are:

1. As per community and stakeholder request, a fully probabilistic approach that both encompasses scientific uncertainty and allows a determination of risk to be placed in the hands of local communities
2. A generalizing of the modeling process that allows for assessment at multiple locations instead of single study sites.

I have just started spinning up this new part of the project via a collaboration with Peter Ruggiero at Oregon State. I have also restarted a collaboration with Sally Hacker in the integrative biology department to try and transfer our predicted future hydrodynamics to changes in the biosphere. So while the sun is setting on the first stage of the project, it only means a rebirth of these important questions.

Newport Sunset

I want to end by expressing my vast gratitude to the Oregon Sea Grant folks for funding this project initially (before I was even a student here) and then funding me through the Malouf scholarship. Their vote of confidence has provided me the funding and motivation to continue onward when things get hard. I hope that when my PhD eventually comes to a close, everyone who has read this blog will be at my defense for the true final blog post update. Thanks Everyone!

Along with my normal blog post, I would like to re-post an article I was featured in for Oregon Sea Grant’s Confluence newsletter. I think the article gives a great overall perspective on my research and how it applies to coastal communities:

How will climate change impact estuaries?

Small estuaries, like those prevalent in the Pacific Northwest, are strongly coupled to their watersheds, and thus signs of climate change will show up visibly in these ecosystems. What this change will look like, and how it will affect our coastal communities and ecosystems, is the foundation of my research.
The first question that should be asked in a research project, especially one viewed through the lens of Oregon Sea Grant’s mission of connecting research and stakeholders, is simply, “Why does this matter?” For me, the answer is that our coasts will change in response to climate change, and if we can find ways to more accurately predict what those changes might be, we’ll have a better chance of being prepared. Experience has shown me that it’s difficult to gain traction with stakeholders over the problem of climate change because of its nebulous nature. My research attempts to replace this “looming shadow” of a threat with something actionable that can be integrated directly into community planning. In this way, I believe my research and Oregon Sea Grant’s base ethic of public service are aligned, as my work is specifically designed to create usable products for Pacific Northwest communities.
My research uses numerical modeling to examine estuaries in Tillamook and Coos Bays as they change through time, driven by the predicted future climate. The current state of the practice for this type of study is the “bathtub model,” in which one simply raises the water level by the predicted amount of sea-level rise. However, this model ignores other effects of climate change such as precipitation, wind, and wave action, resulting in oversimplified data. My procedure greatly expands this paradigm through something called a continual hydrodynamic model run, which captures all the ways in which climate change might affect an estuary.
My advisor, professor David Hill in Oregon State University’s College of Engineering, and I have attended several stakeholder meetings regarding coastal hazards and local community planning, to present our research and to get feedback as to what products might be most useful. We intend to continue to be a presence at such meetings and to provide a scientific resource to communities interested in learning how climate change might affect them. While we have not “solved” the question of climate change’s effect on small estuaries, we are trying to answer the question, and I hope my research will eventually provide a universally usable tool to help coastal communities and ecosystems build resilience to climate change.
Kai Parker is a doctoral candidate in coastal and ocean engineering in OSU’s College of Engineering. He is a 2015–16 Robert E. Malouf Fellow funded by Oregon Sea Grant.

For the full article check out the following link:

http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/sgpubs/confluence-springsummer-2016

Since I spent last post wandering about in the conceptual mire of wave physics, for this post I’m going to fast forward into the real world. So, let’s talk about what the ocean means to us. If I were to poll the people of Oregon asking what the ocean meant to them, I would undoubtedly get a scattershot of answers. Each of us has an individual relationship with the ocean. As a first example of potential answers, this is my brother Travis who is a fisherman in Newport. For Travis the ocean is his universe. His blood runs on salt water to the point he gets “land sick” because solid ground doesn’t rock back and forth like the boats he spends most his time on. While the ocean is his life, it’s not a tame one. Last visit from Travis unveiled a story about having to hold perfectly straight into 40 ft. storm swell for over 36 hours because turning even slightly would have resulted in capsizing. For a fisherman the ocean can mean the edge of life and death.

On a happier note here is a picture I took of Cape Lookout on a day not spent in front of the computer. If you were to look the other way down the lens of the camera you would see 3 absolutely giddy humans overflowing with awe of just how beautiful the ocean was that day. Surfboards in hand, the ocean meant to us a day of play and recreation. In our poll, some of the people we asked would say just that: the ocean is a well of happiness that makes this life worth living.

A final answer to our poll would come in the form of those who come face to face with an angry ocean. As the following picture shows, occasionally the ocean comes knocking at our door with the results oftentimes being dire. Undoubtedly some of the people in our hypothetical poll would reply that the ocean represents a threat to their homes, livelihoods and communities.

The ocean as a hazard to our coastal communities is what drives me as a PhD student. Currently this interest has taken the form of investigating flooding in
estuaries and how it will change into the future.  I hope that by defining the hazards we face we can successfully build resilience into our communities. If we think of the interaction between
the ocean and us as a balance, with knowledge of the system we can shift that balance towards harmony. Now, moving back to our conceptual poll about the ocean. How as scientists can we determine what people find as the biggest threats from the ocean and how best to help? Answer: same as the poll, we ask the people who live there and are interacting with the ocean on a daily basis. For this reason my project has a large community interaction component where we go to the communities and work with the various stakeholders (community planners, citizens, government officials, etc.) to determine what products and answers we can provide that will help us to exist peacefully with the ocean. Then hopefully one day when we ask people what the ocean means to them, the only response will be a smile and shared memory of our wondrous watery neighbor.

After much oscillation, I decided the first slice of my research existence I wanted to discuss would be waves. My motivation for this decision was that when I started this post (a while ago at this point), we had one of the largest wave events experienced by our coast in years. Registering this from my office chair as a buoy reading (http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/) is one thing but in person they were undeniably the largest waves I have ever seen.

It’s hard to get perspective as this is from the top of Yaquina head (a good distance above the ocean) but take my word that those are big fellows. Like massive earth-shacking mobile mountains. Lake watery whales smashing into shore, roaring and flinging foam at us like salty missiles. From the beach the view looked a bit like I should be running the other direction (something I promptly did).

The beach was literally a wall of white water as far as one could see. During these photos the significant wave height at Bouy 46089 was around 38 feet.

All of us on the coast see waves on a daily basis but, like most things in life, never stop to think about what they are, what causes them, and how do they effect the world we live in. Before we jump into this thought, I should sharpen the focus of our question as waves are one of the most common things in the universe. The light hitting your eyeball as you read this past is a wave as is the sound coming from your headphones. Even matter in small enough sizes behaves as a wave as “Dr. Quantum” would be happy to explain to you:

As I am not nearly as awesome as “Dr Quantum” I will be focusing on water surface gravity waves, a microscopic topic in the vast spectrum of wave phenomenon. This said it is fairly awesome to consider the fact that what we see on the ocean is in many ways a metaphor for some of the more complex and mind blowing physics out there. For example the interference pattern from the double slit experiment in the video above is something that we (as coastal engineers) would have to consider. Previous Malouf scholar Annika O’Dea  (scholar http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/education/sea-grant-scholars/meet-scholars/annika-odea-2013) was working on this problem in the context of offshore wave energy converters causing a pattern of high and low wave energy which could potentially effect the shoreline.

So shifting back to the question at hand, the first obvious question would be “what is a surface gravity wave?” The first part of the name is wave. I like to think of waves as a transfer of energy, generally accomplished through an oscillation of “something” (medium would be the more scientific name). In our case the “something” is water.  It’s important to note that despite appearances, what is moving not water but energy. The graphic below shows the path of water particles (circular in deep water and elliptical for shallow water).

This is why if you see a seagull on the surface of the ocean, it doesn’t get “pushed” in the direction of wave propagation, but instead appears to do little circles on the surface.

An important caveat to this is that this concept is only true for linear waves and breaks down for nonlinear conditions (within the surf zone would be an example). Linear wave theory results in waves that are sinusoidal. Not so true in the surfzone.

The details of what the “linear assumption” means is a bit mathy and probably beyond what anyone wants to know, but it’s generally quite accurate for normal ocean conditions. I would say remarkably to magically accurate considering what a drastic assumption it is. The realm beyond this is known as non-linear waves.

The second component of the name is “gravity.” This refers to the restoring force for this particular type of wave. All waves require that the medium has an equilibrium position that is being disturbed. The restoring force is what is trying to return the disturbance to the equilibrium position. If we consider a perfectly calm ocean, it would be perfectly flat and in equilibrium. If something disturbs this (say wind for swell or an earthquake for a tsunami) then the surface is moved upward or downward. Gravity tries to restore the surface to the flat condition that would be perfect balance. Other restoring forces could be the capillary force for very small waves (say when wind is just starting to blow over the surface and create ripples). The restoring force can also be much more complex. For example, with Rosby waves it is the variability of the Coriolis force and the requirement for conservation of absolute vorticity.  This article has a fairly good description of this concept for atmospheric Rosby Waves (there is a corresponding phenomenon within the ocean).

http://archive.onearth.org/articles/2014/08/are-rossby-waves-driving-californias-drought-and-the-mild-eastern-summer

The final part of the name is surface. Surface refers to the fact that that the ocean waves are at the surface of the medium. This may seem obvious but the ocean is actually full of internal waves.

Internal Waves within the South China Sea (NASA’s Shuttle- June 1983)

Waves can form at any interface between two layers. For the surface this is an interface between water and air. For internal waves it is generally between layers of different density.

video credit:  Office of Naval Research, NSF, Sixth Man Productions, Edgeworx.

These waves can be larger than sky scrapers and contain massive energy that is critical to the earth’s climate.

So now we have pretty much only defined waves and I’m probably over my word limit so that may be all for the time being. Next up: How do Surface Gravity Waves effect the world we live in?

Hello World! I am the new Sea Grant Malouf Scholar (Kai) and it is past due time for me to post to the blog. I have been delaying posting due to a whirlwind of ideas as to how I could build a case that would make my research accessible and make sense. My overall project and interests revolve around trying to understand how estuary systems change as a result of climate change. As a bit of a motivation for the problem, the following picture is of Netarts bay along our coast of Oregon.

First of all, beautiful. The coast of Oregon is absolutely epic and everyone should at some point take a trip to soak it in. Second of all, physically there is so much going on in this picture that I could easily talk about it all day. Estuary systems are incredibly complex as they are the meeting point of a variety of environments (land, sea, atmosphere, stream, etc.). The middle of the ocean is nice because it’s just water. Well water and a massive swirling chaos machine know as the atmosphere all of which is spinning on a sphere which makes things appear to curve (the coriollis force). And a massive conveyor belt of currents caused by various temperature and density gradients:

Perpetual Ocean:  https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=3827

So maybe not that nice……. But still better than the coast where you have interaction with land and all the complexities that it brings. In the Netarts picture we see a huge spit (the sandy looking peninsula) has been built as a result of waves slowly, grain by grain pushing sediment for years and years. This in turns modifies the waves (as seen by the odd breaking pattern in there shoals off the tip of the spit). Estuaries also have streamflow coming into the system making density variations and season freshwater influxes a factor. And thats just a taste of the problem. Overall the situation is a mess which is why the geophysics of estuaries is relatively understudied and not particularly well understood.

So my research is trying to work out what drives estuaries but then with the icing on the top: climate change and how it will effect the system. Science assemble!!!!!!!!!

So hopefully over the year I will break down how one goes about approaching this problem. First up…. Waves!