Building Coastal Resilience with NASA Data

Narration: NASA and City of Mobile

Transcript:

There was a beach that ran parallel to this bluff. Even on high tide, you could walk down there and it was a it was really wonderful. And so this is the little piece that I'm trying to hold on to. But I don't know. It's probably not going to be here much longer. When sea level rises, there will be no beaches left.

It'll be just like here.

Global sea levels are rising as a result of human activities as the atmosphere traps heat a lot of that. He gets absorbed by the ocean. When the ocean warms up, it expands and causes sea level to rise. Sea level also rises when warmer air and warmer water near ice sheets causes ice to melt. That ice then flows into the ocean, causing sea level to rise.

Water’s all around us here in Mobile, I grew up in Mobile. It's my home. It is a great historic city. We are an industrial city. We are a port city. But we're also seeing our sea levels rise. We're seeing changes in our climate, in our environment. We're seeing bigger, more powerful storms. And we're seeing a lot more flooding on a more regular basis.

The tide is up. The waves are up because of that strong southwest. And, you know, the causeway is very low. The bay is very shallow. So behind me you see a typical situation. The eastbound lanes of the causeway closed.

We're connecting with stakeholders in coastal communities to understand their needs and provide them with the best possible information to prepare for the changes that they're seeing along their coastlines.

When we work with the City of Mobile, we want to make sure that they have all the science they need to make really great decisions for the future. So we rely on all the NASA data to show us what our future projections of sea level rise could be around here.

Critical infrastructure and land use planning. It's a really expensive prospect. So what you want to do is build it to last at least 50 to 100 years. NASA's sea level rise data that shows what we're going to see coming enables us to plan to build once and for that build to last 50 plus years.

Sea level rise is a challenging problem, but the more we know, the better we can prepare and adapt to our changing environment.

NASA's consistent sea level rise data is the best way and the best tool for us to make sure that we spend our money carefully and wisely so that the future generations get to enjoy our beaches and bays and rivers just as much as I did.