High water woes
Research scientist’s maps show how sea level rise will affect Nova Scotia communities
A student moves a large threedimensional map of Nova Scotia from a lab to the boardroom at the NSCC in Middleton.
It’s a unique model of a coastal province. Sea level in many communities is scant metres from roads, back doors, and critical infrastructure. Dikes have held the water out for centuries in some places, but things may change if scientists are correct in their sea level rise projections.
Dr. Tim Webster takes those projections, plus historical and current data, and makes maps that can show how tides, sea level rise, and storm surges are going to affect your community. Or all three at once.
His Applied Geomatics Research Group printed a 3-D model of Nova Scotia that’s based on elevation mapping the AGRG has been doing for the past 15 years.
Webster looks at places like Amherst, Halifax, Bridgewater, Wolfville and Annapolis Royal where under the right weather conditions it won’t take much of a rise in the level of the ocean to inundate downtowns with seawater.
Coastal Mapping
The science is complicated. It’s not just sea levels rising. It’s the land subsiding. It’s crustal dynamics. It’s the lunar harmonics of the Bay of Fundy. It’s super storms and nor’easters. It’s the gravitational pull of glaciers.
In the end, scientists from around the world seem to agree that sea levels are rising – whatever the contributing factors.
Webster has been at the NSCC for more than 25 years, teaching for 10 years at Lawrencetown’s Centre of Geographic Sciences in remote sensing and GIS, before the research group was established in 2000 through some initial funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
“Even back then the focus of my research was on high resolution mapping of the coastal zone,” he said. “In about 2003 we began using these high resolution elevation models derived from LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) from an aircraft – laser based imaging – using those to map out areas of flood risk from both storm surges today and sea level rise into the future.” See WEBSTER, A4