The beach is a magical place.
It’s beautiful, relaxing, and fun.
This beauty attracts lots of people every year to vacation.
This helps support local businesses which is important
for people in coastal communities to live and to work.
The beaches also provide habitat, or homes,
for many animals like shorebirds, crabs, and turtles.
Something surprising about the beach is that
this magical place is constantly changing
right before your very eyes!
You might think studying sand is not very exciting,
but watching how the sand moves
and how the beach changes during extreme events is really exciting.
So the beach is constantly changing, but how? And why?
I’m Kara Doran. I’m an oceanographer with
the US Geological Survey
in St. Petersburg, Florida.
And what we do is we study the effects of storms on our beaches and we watch how the sand moves
and how that sand moves and erodes and creates hazards
for people, for infrastructure, and for habitat.
I’m out here on Madeira Beach.
It’s in Pinellas County Florida.
It’s a beautiful day on the beach today.
The sun is shining, and the waves are pretty low.
It would be a nice day to bring your family to the beach.
But on a stormy day when there’s a winter storm,
or a tropical storm, or a hurricane,
the waves get very large.
And when the waves get very large, they actually
come up onto the beach, covering the beach
and they move a tremendous amount of sand.
And so that’s why we’re out here studying the beach
because we’re trying to predict how that sand is going to move,
where it will go, and whether the dunes and beach might erode,
or whether the sand might get swept onto our roads,
which prevents people from being able to get out and evacuate during a storm.
Or, it could even be such a severe erosion event that
the beach could erode completely, and form a new inlet
that’s a process called breaching.
So many of our inlets in Pinellas County have been
created by extreme storm events.
So, if you’ve been to John’s pass or Bunces pass
if you’ve ever gone through there on a boat or just taken a look at the beach
that was probably created by a hurricane.
Understanding how the beach changes is really important.
But how do we study a place that is constantly changing?
So because Madeira Beach is so close to our office in St. Petersburg,
we’re able to come out and collect all kinds of different data
to help us understand and predict coastal change.
So Justin is conducting a walking survey
and what he's doing here is as he's walking,
he's recording the elevation of the beach.
And this is called a beach profile.
this helps us understand how much sand is on the beach
and how the sand is moving around.
Every time he comes out to take a survey,
he can see the change in elevation.
We also use it in conjunction with our camera.
So we have a camera up on the roof of the Shoreline Resort
And the camera is recording how the water levels are coming up on the beach
as the waves crash and run up the beach.
We also collect information on tides, storm surge,
breaking waves, and currents,
since the forces they create are the primary causes of coastal change.
Water is strong enough to move lots of sand around
so it’s important to understand how much water
is moving around on the beach.
How high the water moves up the beach during a storm
can influence how much the beach and sand dunes change.
The total water level depends
on several different things.
One is Tides, how water moves
up and down the beach every day in response to the
gravitational effects of the sun and moon on the ocean.
Two is Surge, which happens when winds push
water up the beach during storms.
Three, waves which are
the motion of the water surface
usually caused by the transfer of energy from wind.
Wave energy causes the water to move in acircular motion.
The height and length of these waves combined with the
slope of the beach influence how high the water gets
Rainwater runoff can also contribute to
the total water level in some cases.
We’re able to take this beach survey along with
the video from the camera to get a water level elevation
we use these water level elevations with a model that we have
that we forecast the water level elevation.
So we're comparing the data that we observe with what
we are predicting to see if it's right.
All of these data are fed into models
so scientists at the USGS
can track how the ocean can
change our coastal landscapes.
These models help our scientists predict how and when the beach will change
so people aren’t caught by surprise.
These forecasts are available online for everyone to use.
I really love my job because I get to study the beach.
I always tell people that I love to study it because I can
can wear flip flops for my work, and that’s a bonus.
But, what I really love is it’s always surprising to me
how much the beach changes during these storm events.
The best part of the job is the research that we do in our group
gets out to the public and to people who manage our beaches
and they use it to make decisions about how to best use our beaches
for people and for animals,
and how to use them and protect them and save them
for many years to come.
We love doing this research because
our results can make a difference in people’s lives.
The science conducted by the USGS Coastal Change Hazards team
can have direct impacts on the lives of those
who vacation, live, or nest along our coastlines.