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Kara Doran

Publications and source records attributed to Kara Doran.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Baseline coastal oblique aerial photographs collected from Pensacola, Florida, to Breton Islands, Louisiana, February 7, 2012

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) conducts baseline and storm response photography missions to document and understand the changes in vulnerability of the Nation's coasts to extreme storms (Morgan, 2009). On February 7, 2012, the USGS conducted an oblique aerial photographic survey from Pensacola, Fla., to Breton Islands, La., aboard a Piper Navajo Chieftain at an altitude of 500 feet (ft) and approximately 1,000 ft offshore. This mission was flown to collect baseline data for assessing incremental changes since the last survey, and the data can be used in the assessment of future coastal change. The photographs provided here are Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) images. The photograph locations are an estimate of the position of the aircraft and do not indicate the location of the feature in the images (see the Navigation Data page). These photos document the configuration of the barrier islands and other coastal features at the time of the survey. The header of each photo is populated with time of collection, Global Positioning System (GPS) latitude, GPS longitude, GPS position (latitude and longitude), keywords, credit, artist (photographer), caption, copyright, and contact information using EXIFtools (Subino and others, 2012). Photographs can be opened directly with any JPEG-compatible image viewer by clicking on a thumbnail on the contact sheet. Table 1 provides detailed information about the assigned location, name, data, and time the photograph was taken along with links to the photograph. In addition to the photographs, a Google Earth Keyhole Markup Language (KML) file is provided and can be used to view the images by clicking on the marker and then clicking on either the thumbnail or the link above the thumbnail. The KML files were created using the photographic navigation files (see the Photos and Maps page).

Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi

Hurricane Rita and the destruction of Holly Beach, Louisiana: Why the chenier plain is vulnerable to storms

Hurricane Rita devastated gulf-front communities along the western Louisiana coast in 2005. LIDAR (light detection and ranging) topographic surveys and aerial photography collected before and after the storm showed the loss of every structure within the community of Holly Beach. Average shoreline change along western Louisiana's 140-km-long impacted shore was −23.3 ± 30.1 m of erosion, although shoreline change in Holly Beach was substantially less, and erosion was not pervasive where the structures were lost. Before the storm, peak elevations of the dunes, or berms in the absence of dunes, along the impacted shore averaged 1.6 m. The storm surge, which reached 3.5 m just east of Holly Beach, completely inundated the beach systems along the impacted western Louisiana shore. The high surge potential and low land elevations make this coast extremely vulnerable to hurricanes. In fact, most of the western Louisiana shore impacted by Rita will be completely inundated by the storm surge of a worst-case Saffir-Simpson category 1 hurricane. All of this shore will be inundated by worst-case category 2–5 storms.

Louisiana