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California King Tides Initiative
Click here [ 
498KB ] to download the 2010/2011 California King Tides Initiative Report.
Want more information? Read the Frequently Asked Questions about the Initiative.
The King Tides Initiative began in 2009 in Australia, and has since taken off in Washington and British Colombia, where similar efforts have garnered hundreds of photo submissions. Participants snapped pictures of high tides in their neighborhood and uploaded them to Flickr, a photo sharing website. The photos were geotagged, that is, the photographers noted the location where the photo was taken on a map to give a sense of the areas covered by the Initiative. Many people became interested in the effort and it expanded to other regions. The California King Tides Initiative [ 
pdf 3.5MB ] was inspired by these earlier efforts. Pictures captured from as far north as Humboldt Bay all the way down to San Diego showed many impacts of higher water, such as waves overtopping levees, flooded roads, and inundated natural areas. The images also depict the diversity of shoreline types that will require protection, restoration, retreat or rebuilding strategies as sea level rise occurs and other hazards become more frequent.
The 2011 California King Tides Photo Initiative had two main objectives
- To identify and catalog coastal areas currently vulnerable to tidal inundation;
- To gather compelling images that can be used by anyone to promote awareness of the potential impacts of sea level rise.
The Initiative is a partnership project of the California Coastal Commission, California Coastkeeper Alliance, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coastal Services Center, Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, National Weather Service, San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, and Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve.
More information can be found at: http://californiakingtides.org/