Sea Level Rise Seen with New Eyes: the OWLs of San Mateo (the re-post)

The following was published August 30, 2016, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.
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On Aug. 4, 2016, the climate change communication NGO Climate Access launched a new project in San Mateo, California, on the San Francisco Bay, called Look Ahead - San Mateo. The project involves an installation in a popular bayside park, Coyote Point, to help people visualize future sea levels and approaches for adapting the shoreline.

Bay Area county map. © CC

The project uses a new technology called an OWL® that was piloted by Climate Access for sea level rise education last year in Mill Valley, Marin County, California (read a 4-page brief about that project). The OWL® was created by Owlized, a San Leandro-based tech start-up. The OWL, as described by its creator, is “a public, outdoor virtual reality viewer that shows users the future or history of a place.” An aside for grammar nerds: the word OWL is capitalized not because it is an acronym, but because using all-caps is “the easiest way to differentiate the (mouthful of) digital public information kiosk from our feathered friends,” as clarified by Nate Kauffman at Owlized.

An OWL looks like the coin-operated viewfinder you sometimes find on scenic shorelines, but operate by the push of a button on the side of the viewer and cost the visitor nothing. 

A girl and her family use the OWL viewer.
Photo: Sara S. Moore.

Public installations of OWLs include one at adult height and one at child or wheelchair-user height, in compliance with accessibility laws. Besides showing a 360-degree view of the landscape around the installation site under different scenarios of sea level rise and adaptation, it can collect input from visitors through a simple digital interface guided by an audio script. In Marin over 3,700 visitors gave input on different approaches to shoreline adaptation through the OWLs between June and September 2015. The Look Ahead - San Mateo organizers aim to boost participation by hosting weekend events with local community-based organizations at the OWL site over the five-month duration of the installation.

San Mateo is a place where residents should be looking ahead at sea level rise. According to a 2012 study by the Pacific Institute, of all California counties San Mateo is most vulnerable to sea level rise. That assertion is predicated on the presumption of 1.0 to 1.4 meters (3 ¼ to 4 ½ feet) of sea level rise along the California coast by the year 2100. It’s worth noting that those numbers might be understating the urgency of the situation. That Pacific Institute study was part of California’s Third Climate Assessment, which was delayed in its publication (something known to the author because of her own contribution to the Third Climate Assessment), so the climate scenarios for the report were actually run in 2009. Additionally, a footnote on those 2009 projections cautions that “most climate models fail to include ice‐melt contributions from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and as a result, the potential increase in mean sea level may be much higher” (p. 1). 

Aerial view of the port of Redwood City in
San Mateo County, California, USA. © CC

Now, refinements in sea level rise projections indicate that sea level is rising faster than previously thought (see the Aug. 10, 2016, Washington Post article “Seas aren’t just rising, scientists say — it’s worse than that. They’re speeding up.”). Meanwhile, the launch press release for Look Ahead - San Mateo cites a U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) projection of 3 feet of rise by 2100: a number more conservative than the Pacific Institute’s low-end projection from seven years ago. Across the SF Bay from the OWLs, three runways at Oakland International Airport are already closed for some high tides (Janin & Mandia [2012], Rising Sea Levels: An Introduction to Cause and Impact). San Francisco International, within sight of the OWLs, is sketching out plans for floating runways, seawalls, and levees.

While communicating about sea level rise to San-Mateans is an urgent matter, using innovative technology to communicate about climate change has its trade-offs. While the OWLs do attract visitors—there was a steady stream of passersby lining up at the OWLs on the launch day—the OWLs are costly and breakable. On the launch day one of the two OWLs was not turned on (electrical connection issues), and a week after the launch both OWLs had to be removed for maintenance, returning a few days later.

The OWL installations are being backed by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region IX office through education funds made available after the recent release of updated flood maps. The Marin installation was funded with a 150,000 USD FEMA grant that ran the OWLs from May 2015 to September 2015 (only collecting useable survey data for four of those months). The current installation is supported with a 200,000 USD grant, which will run the OWLs from August 2016 to December 2016. Unfortunately, neither Marin nor San Mateo could afford to purchase and maintain the OWLs on a permanent basis.

There is also the practical problem of installing the OWLs in flood-prone areas. The installation in Marin was on the bayside coast near a hiking/biking trail that is already known to go underwater during some King Tides, putting the electrically powered OWLs at risk of damage: this new installation is on higher ground. Also, reducing the greenhouse gas footprint of the project, the San Mateo OWLs are solar-powered. Another lesson from the Marin pilot was that some people didn’t visit the OWLs because they appeared to cost money (resembling coin-operated viewfinders): a sentence about the viewers being free of cost was added to the signage at the San Mateo coast.

In January the OWLs will be removed and re-installed in San Francisco for a third iteration of the experiment.

Full disclosure: the author is volunteering for the Look Ahead - San Mateo County project doing local social media support. The opinions expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the partners or funders of the project (Climate Access, San Mateo County, Owlized, Dr. Susanne Moser, Antioch University, Nutter Consulting, the California Coastal Conservancy, or FEMA Region IX).

Learn more about the OWL installations and other sea level rise adaptation work ongoing in San Mateo and Marin counties:

• Watch the coverage by a local TV station (KPIX - CBS) of the Look Ahead - San Mateo launch,  August 4, 2016 (1m 48s)


• Read the Project and Research Summary for the OWL installation in Marin: Moser, S.C., Daniels, C., Pike, C. and Huva, A. (2016). Here-Now-Us: Visualizing Sea Level Rise and Adaptation Using the OWL Technology in Marin County, California. Susanne Moser Research and Consulting, Santa Cruz and Climate Access, San Francisco. (69 pages, accessed Aug. 14, 2016).


•  Keep an eye out for San Mateo’s Sea Level Rise Vulnerability Assessment, expected to be released in September 2016 after a draft review meeting with stakeholders.


• Check out Sea Change San Mateo County for info on workshops planned for this October using the “Game of Floods” (a free open-source resource). Read more about the game and the planning award it won (Mill Valley Patch, July 20, 2016).


• You can follow Look Ahead - SMC on Twitter and Facebook.

The Internet of Water (the re-post)

The following was published Oct. 31, 2016, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which appears to have gone defunct. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.
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The installation of a sensor at Ellsworth Pond.

 © 2016 Real Time Water Systems Lab

At the recent Great Lakes Adaptation Forum held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Oct. 5-7, 2016, I heard about an exciting new approach to managing stormwater runoff using remote sensing technology, called the “internet of water,” or “intelligent stormwater grids.” The presentation was about how data-gathering gadgets were installed this past summer around the catchment area of a pond in Ann Arbor by members of the University of Michigan’s Real Time Water Systems Lab, led by engineer Branko Kerkez. I believe I was the only current California resident in the room, so I might have been alone in having a lightbulb go on over my head as I listened to the description of the installations, anticipating Kerkez bringing up the possible applications of this technology for capturing the Los Angeles River runoff that infamously goes straight into the ocean. That water could, if captured and treated, provide the city with all the water it needs, relieving demand on Northern California’s water resources, which depend largely on meltwater from the Sierra snowpack, which is expected to disappear with climate change. It turns out Kerkez previously helped develop real-time remote monitoring of Sierra snowmelt as part of a UC Berkeley research team. California’s drought appears to be one of the initial inspirations for his remote sensing experiments (read more about his earlier work in California here).

This short video from Aug. 5, 2016, describes how the internet of water as developed by Kerkez’s lab might help Los Angeles. With the real-time water management technology, “you can strategically hold back certain portions of [runoff] water and potentially even reuse it,” says Kerkez in the video. By making aging infrastructure responsive to an influx of stormwater you could not only harness the water for other uses but possibly avert a flood by moving water to a less inundated neighborhood.

Still from 2016 video "Building the Internet of Water."
Sensor installation.

Still from 2016 video "Building the Internet of Water."
Remote readout.

On Oct. 1, 2016, California officially entered its sixth year of drought. The Sacramento Bee reported on Sept. 30, that forecasters are predicting “it’s going to take a long time before anyone declares California’s drought over.” Southern California is looking like it will continue to be particularly dry.

Some LA River stormwater runoff is already being captured and used to recharge groundwater, but the LA Department of Water and Power is looking to step up those efforts significantly and introduce direct reuse of runoff with a Stormwater Capture Master Plan, now in its third year of development. Read a PowerPoint from the Plan’s final public hearing in June 2015 describing its scope and ambitions. What the internet of water offers will not revolutionize this project, but it could make the project much more effective.

The goal of the Ann Arbor pilot presently is to demonstrate real-time adaptive management for stormwater. The remote sensing instruments deliver to the internet measurements of the flow in open channels, soil moisture, rainfall, and water quality. Microcontrollers and wireless communication detect and transmit the information at a one-minute resolution. For the demonstration project, ten devices were deployed within a three-square-mile catchment called Ellsworth Pond, selected because the county allowed the team access to it. At this stage, the technology is relatively inexpensive, using data analysis algorithms and hardware platforms custom-made in Kerkez’s lab.

Some of the barriers to using these devices for management that were discussed at the GLAF presentation are the challenges of identifying and reducing errors in the data, and vandalism of the instruments. So far the lab has not had to deal with the latter problem, but it may arise as more instruments are installed in more densely populated areas. Also, a May 2016 article in Environmental Science and Technology (Kerkez et al.) states that the research on how to create a smarter stormwater system is not limited by technology, but “rather by a much more fundamental need to understand the complex spatiotemporal dynamics that govern water flow and quality across large urban areas.”

Before moving on to helping solve Los Angeles’ stormwater runoff problems, these water management gadgets will be piloted further in Ann Arbor, Toledo, Milwaukee, and Fort Worth-Dallas, using real-time data from the water system to paint a better picture of how stormwater behaves and how we might use it more wisely.

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Learn more about the smarter stormwater management pilot projects by the University of Michigan’s Real Time Water Systems Lab: 

• Open Storm, the Real Time Water Systems Lab's "smart" water system project web site:  http://open-storm.org/
• Kerkez’s bibliography of articles on “smart” water systems: http://open-storm.org/read/
• Check out the lab’s DIY instructions for “simple-to-assemble controllers” you can attach to ponds, rain barrels, green roofs & etc. to control the flow of stormwater before and during storms: http://open-storm.org/procedure/control/

The Internet of Water is Here

I have a new post up on the WWF ClimatePrep blog! It's on the internet of water - featuring the work of Branko Kerkez's lab at the University of Michigan, the Real-Time Water Systems Lab. His remote-sensing network-of-gadgets could play a big role in pushing ahead a city's capacity to reuse stormwater, something desperately needed in Los Angeles, where the majority of the city's stormwater goes directly into the ocean, but could supply the city with all the water it needs if it could be captured and redirected.

Here are some stills from an August 2016 video explaining the main pilot project Kerkez's lab is doing in Ann Arbor, Michigan:

An example of a read-out from one of the remote sensors installed by the Real-Time Water Systems Lab team. This is a smart phone displaying data fed to the internet at a one-minute resolution.

The installation of a sensor at Ellsworth Pond, Ann Arbor (2016).

There's so much unrealized potential for creating "smart" (or "smarter") water systems: this is just a small step in that direction.

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Update: WWF's ClimatePrep blog apparently went defunct in 2018 and may not be revived.  I'm updating this blog's links to ClimatePrep to snapshots on Archive.org (where available). Some articles look OK there, some not so OK. For a readable version with images intact, see my ClimatePrep articles as reconstructed on this blog:

• Head in the Clouds: The Dream of Harvesting Water from Fog
June 08, 2017

• Story Maps: A Rising Star of Climate Change Communication
April 10, 2017

• The Sea Level Rise Solution that is as Charismatic as Mud
February 17, 2017

• The Internet of Water - October 31, 2016

• Sea Level Rise Seen with New Eyes: the OWLs of San Mateo
August 30, 2016

• California: The Rebeavering
May 22, 2015

• Government Folly in the Face of Climate Change
March 19, 2015

• In the Heat of the Moment
December 02, 2014

• California’s Adaptation Clarion Call
September 02, 2014

• Farmland in Flux
July 8, 2014

• Honest Conversations: Climate Change and Uncertainty
December 12, 2013