Sea It Rise enables you to plan for sea level rise impacts using your smartphone as a data collection and visualization device.
The seas are rising and will rise faster later this century. The historical data is clear and the scientific consensus is unequivocal. Even so, the rate of change is small, and the desire to adapt to sea level increase is not overwhelming. This is unfortunate because sea level rise directly affects public safety, local fisheries, shipping and trade. Indeed, since human society has flourished during a period of relative sea level stability, almost all our coastal infrastructure and livelihoods are built around the current height of the ocean. Unfortunately, if often takes serious weather events like Hurricane Katrina or Tropical Storm Harvey to remind us of the fragility of that infrastructure.
One problem that exists is the simple fact that “seeing is believing”. While the seas rise and fall each day with the comings and goings of the tide, the slow increase caused by sea level rise is small, almost imperceptible. The difficulty of observing these changes is understandable, as anyone who lives along the coast can attest. Perhaps you have begun a nice walk down the beach that became a wet and wild adventure when you forgot to pay attention to the incoming tide. Or maybe the kayak you pulled way up the beach floated away when you neglected to tie it off. Neither of those situations is the result of some massive tidal surge, but rather the impact of slowly increasing water levels sneaking up on you.
The basic premise of Sea It Rise is to use your smartphone as a "viewer" of sea level rise impact, using a simple overlay to indicate future water levels. Wondering what your favorite beach might look like after a couple of feet of sea level rise? Pull out your smartphone, fire up the app and see whether you are standing in a future puddle. Want to record what the beach looks like when the closest tidal gauge is at a certain height? Snap a picture, add a note and upload to an archive of other shoreline pictures taken with the app. Want to compare to other tidal heights? Browse the map for other images taken nearby. Engaging individuals in collecting their own data sparks conversations and interest in a way that showing a map of areas impacted by future sea level rise does not.
We believe that Sea It Rise fits well into the Education and Public Safety categories of the HeroX Big Ocean Button Challenge. If you spend any time in and around the water and/or planning field excursions, finding areas that might be impacted by sea level rise is greatly facilitated by this app, including the ability to see photos from others at that location as well as viewing tide and current predictions for the site of interest. Coastal planners, environmental science teachers and beach naturalist programs could all use this our application to make their activities more meaningful. Allowing students or participants to become data collectors and see their work recognized can further motivate them to learn more about coastal resiliency and what changes and approaches might help mitigate future impacts.
Sea It Rise has evolved considerably since the prototype submission in September 2017 and the final public vote at the end of October. Our initial strategy of developing and HTML5 app paid off by allowing fast interations and flexibility.
One significant improvement of the user experience and overall data mashup for Sea It Rise was to incorporate hashtag searching on Flickr to find photos with #hightide, #lowtide, #surf and #seaitrise tags. Integration from Flickr to the Sea It Rise web-app was fairly quick, and a similar strategy could work well for Twitter hashtags as well. Since users are particularly interested in posting "WOW!" photos and tagging them using Twitter and Flickr, these markers may serve to highlight coastal areas that are particularly sensitive to storm and/or high tide events. One can imagine that a small social marketing hashtag campaign from HeroX or other partners would greatly expand awareness and help the general public become more aware of the need to plan for coastal resiliency.
The web application is now feature complete (although continually improving) and the Android performance is significantly better, which motivates us to make native apps that have feature parity to the HTML5 environment.
*** iPhone and Android compatible. *** Fast iteration and experimentation happens here.