The Norfolk-based environmental nonprofit, Wetlands Watch, is seeking volunteers from Oct. 17-20 for its annual partnered community science project, Catch the King.

This program invites participants in your own community to use Wetlands Watch’s mobile phone app, Sea Level Rise, to collect GPS data along the outer edges of where flooding occurs during high tides. For more information, and to register, visit www.wetlandswatch.org/catchtheking.

The event’s name refers to tidal flooding that happens during king tides, when the full or new moon is in perigee (its orbit is closest to the Earth). On these days the moon’s gravitational pull elevates sea levels causing flooding over streets and infrastructure during high tides. These events are often called “sunny-day” floods because high tide cycles can cause flooding on a clear, sunny day. Those living in coastal Virginia may have already caught a glimpse of what to expect in October as the first wave of king tides brought extensive nuisance flooding to many areas from Sept. 16-23.

Catch the King was founded as a collaborative effort to give members of the public an opportunity to engage personally in climate change adaptation. While the development of the Sea Level Rise app was led by Wetlands Watch and local tech company, Open Health Innovations, the idea for creating a statewide program stems from the creative minds of Wetlands Watch’s former Executive Director Skip Stiles, retired Virginian-Pilot reporter Dave Mayfield, and Virginia Institute of Marine Science assistant professor Dr. Derek Loftis.

The Sea Level Rise app was launched for beta testing in 2014. During Catch the King’s official launch in 2017, the project broke a Guinness World Record for “most contributions to an environmental survey” thanks to the efforts of over 700 volunteers and nearly 60,000 unique high water marks.

Studying the present impacts of king tides provides a vision of what lies ahead; the water levels of these astronomical events today will be our “normal” flood events of the future due to sea level rise. One particularly notable prediction from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—these “normal” sunny-day floods will occur nearly one-third of the year by 2050 in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region. Through partnership with VIMS and the lead research support of Loftis, Catch the King data is being used to help validate flood prediction models—a tool useful to local governments, policy makers, and the public to learn more about how sea level rise impacts communities of today, and how to plan and adapt to future conditions.