Sediment Research

Danika van Proosdij, Brent Law, Paul Hill, Tim Milligan and others will be starting the field work portion of their OEER projects the week of May 2 on the Kingsport flats. Testing will take place the week prior. Paul Hill, Tim Milligan, Brent Law and students will be coring and doing erosion tests on both the flats and channels over the next year. Every couple of months we will be making particle size measurements in the water column and on the seabed with a suite of instruments, including floc camera, LISSTS, etc. The last week of March the A5 mooring was put back in place by Gary Bugden and a 13 hour anchor station was completed with particle size measurements, filtering for suspended mass, and light measurements (Ed Horne) to relate concentration on the ground to that observed by the MERIS satellite. We were also able to round up a few bucks to have LIDAR flown for the Kingsport area as part of a larger CHS program.

Given the purpose of our project, we will be focusing on spring tidal conditions since we need to cover the high marsh. We are planning for short intensive bursts of experiments at multiple times during the year rather than one long deployment. The first deployment will be on May 3 (instrument set-up) recording May 4-May 7 (7 tides); the next set will be from July 3-6 (7 tides); the third will be Aug 31-Sept 3 (7 tides). We also hope to deploy in November and during the winter but dates are not finalized yet.

Contact - If anyone wants to tie into our work or join in for a period of time or just visit the site, please contact Casey O'Laughlin casey.olaughlin@gmail.com who will be coordinating the research activities this summer.