’Citizen scientists’ use drones to map El Nino flooding

LONG BEACH, Calif. – Forget about selfies. In California, residents are using smartphones and drones to document the coastline’s changing face.

Starting this month, The Nature Conservancy is asking tech junkies to capture the flooding and coastal erosion that come with El Nino, a weather pattern that’s bringing California its wettest winter in years – and all in the name of science.

The idea is that crowd-sourced, geotagged images of storm surges and flooded beaches will give scientists a brief window into what the future holds as sea levels rise from global warming, a sort of a crystal ball for climate change.

Images from the latest drones, which can produce high-resolution 3-D maps, will be particularly useful and will help scientists determine if predictive models about coastal flooding are accurate, said Matt Merrifield, the organization’s chief technology officer.

“We use these projected models and they don’t quite look right, but we’re lacking any empirical evidence,” he said. “This is essentially a way of ‘ground truthing’ those models.”

Experts on climate change agreed that El Nino-fueled storms offer a sneak peek of the future and said the project was a novel way to raise public awareness.

“It’s not the answer, but it’s a part of the answer,” said Lesley Ewing, senior coastal engineer with the California Coastal Commission. “It’s a piece of the puzzle.”

The Nature Conservancy has partnered with a San Francisco-area startup called DroneDeploy that will provide a free app to drone owners for consistency. The app will provide automated flight patterns at the touch of a screen while cloud-based technology will make managing so much data feasible, said Ian Smith, a business developer for the company.