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What does a CTD look like in a hurricane?

A project log for Ocean Sensing for Everyone: The OpenCTD

A low-cost, open-source oceanographic instrument kit to measure our changing oceans

andrewdavidthalerandrew.david.thaler 10/22/2022 at 00:590 Comments

In 2016, Hurricane Hermine roared up the eastern seaboard and struck our little farm in Virginia as a Category 1. Which is great if the wind is all you have to worry about, but on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, it pushed a huge wall of water up into the estuary. 

So, of course, I dropped a CTD into our drainage ditch and watched the tide roll in. 

There's a few cool things you can see from these two tidal cycles. The marsh by our farm was pretty fresh that September, so the first weird feature is a massive wall of very salty water coming though, in grey. This was an early prototype, so it lost calibration (or, more likely, I did a poor job calibrating it), but we confirmed with other instruments that, though the real salinity measurements are off, the trend holds. 

You can see, just before the second peak, that it started to rain, hard, driving the salinity back down, quickly. 

And, to the delight of my insurance agent, you can see the depth plateau for a moment before the highest high tied. This is what happens when a storm surge breaches a retaining wall and pours into the yard. This was also the hurricane where we got to deploy my own research ROV to inspect the damage under my house. It was a day. 

And don't worry. I don't live there anymore. We got out of dodge soon after and NOAA now recognizes the region as a Habitat Focus Area: Middle Peninsula Habitat Focus Area. One day, probably soon, that old farm will return to the Bay. 

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