July 2012 (ROTM#43) Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia

Bondi Beach seems to be getting a lot of attention here in Australia with almost every reality television show seemingly based around it. It’s also getting a lot of attention from rip current scientists. We’ll be doing some big rip experiments during July and August this year measuring all of the rips on the beach simultaneously using GPS drifters. We’ve also got a long-term coastal imaging camera on one of the local rooftops that creates amazing images like the one in this picture. This was Bondi Beach on March 3, 2012.

 The camera basically takes a picture every second. If you average all those pictures over a period of 30 minutes, you get what’s called a time exposure. What’s great about these time exposures is that you can clearly see the shallow sandbars (the white areas where the waves are breaking) and the deeper channels, which are darker because less waves are breaking. It’s a great way to monitor the location of the rips and sandbars and if you do it every day, you can see how the beach evolves over time with changing wave conditions. In this picture, on this day, you can see that the outer sandbar is very rhythmic, and I can count about 7-8 rips...how did you go?

View from Bondi Research Camera