Category Archives: climate

Building a Resilient Coast: Maine Confronts Climate Change

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Building a Resilient Coast: Maine Confronts Climate Change

“The ocean is coming up, higher than it ever has. The climate is changing. The ocean water is warm, a lot warmer,” warns Timothy Pellerin, Emergency Management Agency, Lincoln County, Maine. Building a Resilient Coast addresses the concerns and interests of coastal Maine residents. The hour-long documentary highlights key climate change issues including public perception and the need to protect both private and public property from millions of dollars of future storm damage. The one-hour program was produced by Oregon Sea Grant as part of a NOAA-funded project with Maine Sea Grant.

Twelve short excerpts from the documentary can be found on the Sea Grant Web site.

They present “take home” messages and insights. The documentary focuses on coastal residents who are “being the change” that the circumstances warrant. For example, homeowner Dee Brown built her shoreline house on piers to withstand a rising sea and what she rightly calls, “terrible storms.”

New federal climate change report available online

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NOAA Climate Change coverA new report from the nation’s top science agencies, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States,” is available in full and in summary from the US Global Change Research Program Web site.

The report, released yesterday by presidential science advisor John Holdren and NOAA director Jane Lubchenco, represents an unprecedented multi-agency summary of the science and the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future. It focuses on climate change impacts in different regions of the U.S. – including the Pacific Northwest – and on various aspects of society and the economy.

“This report demonstrates that climate change is happening now, in our own backyard, and it affects the things that people care about,” Lubchenco said.

A printable .pdf fact sheet summarizes what the Northwest can expect from changing climate, including rising sea levels, further stresses on salmon and other coldwater fish, and reduced water supplies due to declining winter snow packs.

For more information about the scientific and cultural challenges posed by a changing climate, visit Oregon Sea Grant’s Climate Change page.

Crabbers collaborate with OSU researchers to monitor ocean temperature, hypoxia

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launching a crabpot with a sensor attachedCORVALLIS, Ore. – In a unique, symbiotic relationship, Oregon crabbers are working with Oregon State University researchers funded by Oregon Sea Grant to use their crab pots as underwater monitoring stations where data collectors attached to the pots gather vital oceanographic information.

This information might help crabbers more effectively locate their catch while helping scientists provide answers to challenging research questions, such as why and when hypoxia zones form in coastal waters.

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Documentary Preview: Michael Harte

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In this preview to an upcoming documentary featuring Climate Change in Oregon, Michael Harte (Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, or COAS) explains that the effects of global climate change on our day-to-day lives are not necessarily the effects talked about in the larger discussion of climate change.

The documentary, scheduled for release this summer, will feature interviews with researchers that are already identifying effects on Oregon’s coast linked to climate change.  Part of the film will include recent research findings by Jack Barth (COAS) who discusses how local salmon are affected by changes in ocean conditions.  Sea Grant Extension agent, Robert Emmanuel, will describe recent increases in flooding in Tillamook, and Nathan Mantua, from the University of Washington, will talk about the effects of increasing winter storm activity.

Transcript is available at the above link

Oregon Sea Grant’s Julie Howard publishes article about hypoxia

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“In 2006, Oregon and Washington experienced the worst hypoxic event on record as near-shore oxygen levels dropped in some places to zero…”

So writes Julie Howard, Oregon Sea Grant program assistant, in the March/April 2009 edition of Oregon Coast magazine. Her article, “An Ocean without Oxygen,” goes on to describe some of the possible causes of hypoxia, the devastating effects, and how researchers and fishermen are collaborating to address the issue.

For more information about the hypoxia phenomenon, visit the Web site of the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO).

Rip Currents Could Play Role in Increased Coastal Erosion

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CORVALLIS, Ore. – Amid growing concern about rising sea levels triggered by global warming, Oregon Sea Grant researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) are discovering that rip currents might play a role in coastal erosion because they create rip embayments, or low areas on sandy beaches, that expose nearby land to higher rates of erosion by wave activity.

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Surveys about adapting to changing climate reveal coastal concerns

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Coastal officials and owners of coastal property in East and West coast states don’t need to be persuaded that climate change is happening. They believe that both government and individuals should begin taking action now to adapt to expected effects. These are among several insights from surveys conducted in Oregon and Maine by the Sea Grant programs in those states. The surveys, launched in parallel in early 2008, are believed to be the largest studies to date to focus on United States’ coastal populations and the challenge of adapting to the expected effects of coastal climate change, such as a rise in sea level.

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Researchers study risk of higher waves, rising sea level to Pacific coast

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Coastal wavesWhile hurricanes Gustav and Ike were pummeling the Gulf Coast with rains and record flooding, researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) were studying why wave heights in the Pacific Ocean have been increasing in recent years and how this phenomenon – coupled with global warming – might affect coastal erosion, flooding and development along the Pacific Northwest coast.

Peter Ruggiero, an assistant professor of geosciences at OSU, is developing new computer models that factor in the increasing wave heights, as well as rising sea levels and the potential increase in frequency of El Niño weather conditions. El Nino is a cyclic water temperature weather pattern that results in warmer than normal ocean temperatures and triggers larger storms in the Pacific Ocean.

“We’re trying to see how a combination of these different processes – bigger waves, higher sea levels and potentially more frequent and intense El Niño conditions – could affect coastal areas along the Pacific Coast in a range of ways, from coastal erosion and lowland flooding to planned development,” said Ruggiero, whose research is funded in part by a $190,000 grant from Oregon Sea Grant.

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Communities and climate change

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Sea Grant programs in Oregon and Maine are collaborating on a two-year effort to help the nation’s coastal communities understand and prepare for climate change.

The project is supported by a $290,000 grant is from NOAA’s Sectoral Applications Research Program .

Leading the project is Joe Cone, assistant director of Oregon Sea Grant and head of its communications team. The project aims to develop and test a model of public outreach about climate change that may ultimately be used by Sea Grant programs in all US coastal and Great Lakes states.

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