Community Invited to Discuss King Tide Event

The King Tide flooding data has been collected: now what?

On Dec. 13, Old Dominion's Commonwealth Center for Recurrent Flooding Resiliency will host researchers and community members at the University to discuss flood data collected during the "Catch the King" Tide event in November.

The crowdsourcing-based research event collected data from more than 500 volunteers from Virginia Beach to Gloucester. Volunteers walked along the edges of flooded areas and recorded data points on a digital map using a locally-developed phone app. The data were then transferred to researchers, who have been using it to check the accuracy of flooding predictions, update maps and calibrate models, said Derek Loftis, assistant research scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, which is part of the Commonwealth Center partnership.

"Basically, our volunteers were able to walk along the water's edge during the high tide and drop GPS pins along their path as they traced floodwaters, and we were able to get their timestamp, along with latitude and longitude, sometimes accurate to within a foot depending on the user's phone model," Loftis said.