An army of people are using drones, smartphones to watch El Nino in California

The Nature Conservancy in California is sourcing local residents with smartphones and drones to document coastal erosion and evolution patterns according to an Associated Press report. The agency is specifically seeking more empirical evidence of El Nino’s—a band of warm water that develops in central and eastern areas of the equator—effect and comparing the recording data to earlier projected models.

Scientists intend to use the geotagged, crowd-sourced data of the storm surges to give them an idea of future weather activity and rise in the sea level due to global warming, essentially another interactive model of evidence to raise awareness. Images from the drones produce high-resolution 3-D maps, a better indication of global warming’s damage in contrast to the previous data mining. Matt Merrifield, the organization’s chief technology officer said, “We use these projected models and they don’t quite look right, but we’re lacking any empirical evidence,” and adds, “This is essentially a way of ‘ground truthing’ those models.”

Yet because of the crowd-sourced nature of the experiment scientists will interpret the findings with a grain of salt.“It’s not the answer, but it’s a part of the answer,” said Lesley Ewing, senior coastal engineer with the California Coastal Commission. “It’s a piece of the puzzle.”

California’s critical infrastructure including schools, power plants and highways will be at risk of being flooded during a vicious storm if the sea level escalates another 4.6 feet predicted to become a reality by 2100 determined by a study conducted in 2009 by the Pacific Institute commissioned by three state agencies. This damage is also projected to affect a half-million people and cause $100 billion in property damage.

Naturally, beaches will diminish in size or become obsolete. William Patzert, a climatologist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory adds, “When you get big winter storm surge like they want to document, you tend to lose a lot of beach,” he said. “In a way, it’s like doing a documentary on the future. It’ll show you what your beaches will look like in 100 years.”

The mapping data, however, won’t be able to forecast precisely which beaches will vanish and certain bluffs that will crumble, critical information that will influence coastal communities. “We’re not going to capture that change,” she said. “We’re going to capture where the water could go to with this current landscape and that’s still a very important thing to understand because it gets at those hot spots,” Ewing said.