Catch the King is Back in Person- Five Years Along and Better Than Ever

Catch the King is back!

The celebrated citizen science flood mapping effort is coming to coastal Virginia Saturday, October 29th with a new smart phone app and a renewed sense of purpose. We’re turning out hundreds of people to map the flood waters on one of the highest tides of the year. We may not have as many as when we were entered into the Guinness Record Book, but there will be lots of boots on the shoreline.

Every fall we see higher tides - the perigean spring tides - that run about 1.5 feet higher than normal. This will send water onto the streets of tidewater Virginia and give us a chance to map these flood waters and engage the public to crowdsource information about the extent of the flooding.

Girl Scout partners during Catch the King mapping in 2020.

The phone app allows you to walk the edge of the inundation area and drop virtual pins every five feet or so that, when taken together, give an outline of the extent of the flooding.

Image showing flood outline for a 2015 flood event

The screen shot above shows a mapping we did a few years ago during a high tide. Each of those points has geo-location data attached to it and these points can be exported in file tables and given to modelers and mappers and turned into data layers for their mapping.

Data table generated by the mapping event.

This effort has also spawned other, parallel sea level rise and flooding events. Since 2017, Old Dominion University researchers have been holding a “Measure the Muck” event to sample pollution brought by the flooding. This work is interested in what the flood waters bring back into rivers during these nuisance flooding events.

Another parallel event is the “Blue Line Project,” which lays out blue markers around the city of Norfolk, showing where the future shorelines will be.

We look forward to engaging more partners and developing more awareness-raising events in future Catch the King Tide events!