Rosenberg Institute 2017 Fall Seminar at EOS Center: Dr. Cassia Pianca

“Coastal Geomorphology Evolution from Hours to Decades: Lessons from Video Remote Sensing”

by Dr. Cassia Pianca, Marine Scientist at Coastal Oceanography Lab from EOS Center, San Francisco State University.

“The coastal zone is the extremely dynamic transitional area between land and oceanic environments. Most of the world’s population lives in or near these regions, thus they are important for economic and social reasons. A better understanding of these places is required for the proper management to preserve them for future generations. Interest in these regions has intensified in recent years due to climate change issues such as an increase in hurricane occurrence, loss of coastal areas due to erosion, change of the wave climate, and sea level rise. The processes that occur in these coastal environments are responsible for its complexity and diversity. These processes can vary at time scales from seconds to geological periods, and space scales from meters to tens of kilometers. The main obstacle to obtaining information on coastal variability is the lack of large temporal and spatial measurements using conventional methods. With the advent of remote sensing, low spatial and temporal resolution can be overcome, especially with the development of video cameras to study nearshore environments. Results from two different coastal regions in North Carolina using this remote sensing technique will be presented: time-space variability and forcing dependencies of a 26-year record of daily to hourly shoreline data from Duck Beach, and a description of the migration pattern of bedform features associated with an ebb-tidal delta during a 23-day experiment at New River Inlet.”

“Dr. Cassia Pianca has a Bachelor’s degree in Oceanography and a Master of Science in Geological Oceanography from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and a Ph.D. in Physical-Geological Oceanography from the University of Sao Paulo in collaboration with Oregon State University. After graduate school, Dr. Pianca conducted research at Rutgers University on sediment dynamics and circulation in Jamaica Bay, New York. Her research area is centered on the study of coastal and estuarine processes, focusing on sediment transport and morphodynamics, beach processes, sandbar, and bedforms evolution, swash processes, measurements of nearshore waves and currents, and application of remote sensing to nearshore processes.”

The seminar schedule can be found here