Resilience--evidence from the boat show

Last week I went to one of the government web sites with has GIS data on the US coasts.  A number of my links were broken, and after digging around, found most of them.  One now emphasizes "resilience", since that is apparently a term that is agnostic about causes, and lets us keep our heads in the sand and wait for more evidence while we try to burn more of that beautiful black coal that is economically unviable and blackens our lungs.

Within days, the city got to show its resilience as flooding covered downtown.

NOAA has three different tidal prediction sites.  This one uses MSL (mean sea level), which for Annapolis is the same as NAVD which is used for lidar surveys and maps on land.  The peak floods this weekend were at 3.42 feet MSL, which is 1.05 meters.  The blue predictions show that the upcoming harvest full moon had little impact of the high water levels.

A different NOAA site, which has a longer time period but uses MLLW.  Melissa (the storm) is blamed for the steady incress in tide level from Oct 9 to the 12, 

My model for the flooding, superimposed on Google Earth imagery.  Everything around City Dock gets wet.  We ground truthed the model Saturday morning, Saturday evening, and Sunday morning.

Reflections in the standing water make for pretty pictures (and wet boat show attendees).

Water at the main entrance to the Fleet Reserve Club.

Not sure the hotel wanted waterfront on this side of the building.

We heard some of the boat show cleanup crew explaining what caused the flooding.  It was the number of boats they brought in , which displace a LOT of water.   That water has to go somewhere, which must happens to up and into town.  This is politically a much better solution than the climate change excuse we also heard, since if the boats cause it, we won't have to spend any money on the environment.

At the height of the flooding, Alex Haley was confined to a small corner, reading to children surrounded by signs of commercialism.  I wonder if he could be reading about the Lorax, and the role of man in causing the rising water.

Next day the water is gone, for a while, but  capitalism remains.  The water will probably return, and rise higher.