Santa Barbara High School Students Ride Wave of Technology to Help Survey Sea Changes

If you’re a beach-goer, you know California beaches can be very different places from day to day, season to season, and year to year. Migratory species come and go. The water rises and falls. And tides and storms move sand in mysterious ways that even complex scientific models don’t yet fully capture.

Sea-level rise — projected to increase by around one foot in the Santa Barbara area by the year 2050 — makes understanding these dynamics more urgent than ever. Yet to calibrate these models, researchers need more detailed data about the dynamics of these sandy ecosystems.

That’s why every month, small teams of Santa Barbara and Ventura area community members head to beaches up and down the coast to carefully survey beach elevation. […]

Working under the guidance of Kevin Parent (CoAST SB volunteer), Paula Cassin (Santa Barbara High Computer Science Academy Fund) and Jared Fitton (app project manager), the high school students developed a new data collection app that CoAST SB volunteers use to collect data during monthly beach profile surveys. […]

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