August 2014 (ROTM#68) Carolina Beach, North Carolina, USA

I'm in Wilmington, North Carolina for most of August as part of my research sabbatical for the second half of 2014. Amongst the many rip current related projects I'm involved with, the one that's most fun is helping out Spencer Rogers from the North Carolina Sea Grant and his grad student Cobi Christiansen from the University of North Carolina Wilmington doing rip current experiments using GPS drifters.

No-one has used these drifters to monitor rip current flow behaviour on the US East Coast. Spencer and Cobi want to find out how North Carolina rip currents behave in terms of how often they re-circulate within the surf zone or eject water (and drifters) offshore of the surf zone. This picture of Cobi was taken by his Dad (Curt) at Carolina Beach the last week of July and is perhaps the best example of drifter retrieval I've ever seen!

The rip wasn't great, flowing slowly at a very strong angle to the beach, but the team is on call for the rest of the month, including some experiments at the Outer Banks in mid-August. The drifter is a nifty new design created by the rip guru Associate Professor Jamie MacMahan from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA. Best part of the day was perhaps the excellent media coverage of the experiment which got shown on Good Morning America

Rip science is fun