East Hampton Village Beach serves as focus of new conclusions on rip currents

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Two Stony Brook University researchers set up a camera and seismometer at this East Hampton home on Georgica Beach to monitor rip currents.

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Through years of research and more than 500 hours of video footage taken at Georgica Beach in East Hampton Village, two researchers from the State University of New York at Stony Brook are on their way to developing a mechanism for predicting rip currents, a breakthrough they say will be helpful to both beachgoers and those who want to protect beaches.

Rip currents are powerful currents of water that flow away from the shoreline and can be dangerous for swimmers. According to the United States Lifesaving Association, rip currents are responsible for more than 100 deaths a year.

“Rip currents are the main danger at the beach,” said Michael Slattery, a doctoral candidate who worked on the research. “There’s not a whole lot known about prediction.”

Mr. Slattery said he chose to become involved in the project because while many scientists have come up with pieces of the puzzle, nobody has yet been able to put them all together and produce a model for predicting when rip currents will occur.

Mr. Slattery joined Dr. Henry Bokuniewicz, a professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook, who has been doing research on rip currents and beach erosion, which are often linked, at the East Hampton Village beaches for 30 years.

Dr. Bokuniewicz’s research had focused mainly on rip currents and their relation to beach erosion, but when he was joined by Mr. Slattery and the two were able to make use of new technology, they began to focus their research on predicting when and how rip currents will occur.

Dr. Bokuniewicz said one of the reasons he chose to do his research in East Hampton was that when he started monitoring wave conditions in the late 1970s, the East End was experiencing severe beach erosion, and residents were concerned.

“We see a lot of changes in the beach,” he said. “One of the objectives was always to try to explain these.”

To do this, Dr. Bokuniewicz eventually set up a camera to monitor waves off shore and where they break on-shore. With help from the East Hampton Beach Preservation Society, he was able to get a resident with a beachfront house to allow him to install the camera at the top of their house. Through photos, Dr. Bokuniewicz and Mr. Slattery were able to monitor rip currents, recognized by a gap in a line of incoming waves, and determine their average duration, which, in East Hampton, is just a few minutes.

According to Dr. Bokuniewicz, rip currents at Georgica Beach don’t last long enough to significantly alter the shoreline, something he said most East Enders who have seen the past erosion, especially at Georgica Beach, would never believe. But Dr. Bokuniewicz said that on Long Island, beaches tend to rebuild themselves in cycles, and that places like Georgica Beach have been naturally replenished.

“One of the conditions in East Hampton is that you get something called spot erosion. One spot will erode severely and the place near it will be relatively unchanged,” he said. “But with a long-term record we get a better perspective to how the beach is changing, and at this point it’s not just month-to-month changes, it’s year-to-year and even decade-to-decade.”

Dr. Bokuniewicz said that moving forward, it’s going to be more important to focus on Mr. Slattery’s interest in predicting these conditions.

Mr. Slattery has built upon Dr. Bokuniewicz’s research by adding another form of measurement. Mr. Slattery uses a seismometer, a device that is designed to measure earthquakes, to measure a certain kind of wave that also makes seismic noises. Infragravity waves, Mr. Slattery said, are barely visible but give off vibrations that are picked up by the seismometer. He said that he uses data from the seismometer and compares it with the footage of the rip currents to link the occurrence of rip currents to the presence of infragravity waves.

When he completes his analysis, if Mr. Slattery finds there is a positive correlation, which can be used for prediction, his conclusions will be the first of their kind.

“It’s been known for a while that infragravity waves make seismic noise,” he said. “But nobody has ever taken it to the next level.”

Last week, Dr. Bokuniewicz and Mr. Slattery presented their research at a conference in Florida, where Dr. Bokuniewicz said people seemed to have a lot of interest in the seismometer method because both the issue of beach erosion and the danger of 
rip currents to swimmers are so prevalent.

“People from all over the country are dealing with similar sorts of problems and trying to make similar sorts of measurements,” he said. “But beaches are very different from place to place so you look for common ground.”