New York's Jamaica Bay Broad Channel Cross Bay Bridge. Credit: Bjoertvedt / Wikimedia

The Community Flood Watch Project is collecting resident reports of flooding in Jamaica Bay

— Published by Yale Climate Connections
(Reporting credit: ChavoBart Digital Media)

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Brooklyn, NY, September 9, 2020 - Many of New York City’s coastal residents are plagued by flooding – during storms and on sunny days.

“There are certain times of the year associated with the new and full moons where it brings higher-than-normal high tides. And with that, those tides can bring flooding into communities,” says Helen Cheng, a former coastal resilience extension specialist with New York Sea Grant and with the Science and Resilience Institute.

She says in the Jamaica Bay watershed, flooding can block access to the subway station that people need to get to work from day to day.

“Even services, sometimes – you know, the delivery of mail – can get impacted by water on the streets.”

Cheng says tidal flooding is getting worse as sea levels rise, and it’s important to know how people are affected. So as part of the Community Flood Watch Project, residents document and report flooding.

“There’s a lot of value in on-the-ground information and community data, right? Because they’re living in these places and experiencing these events 24/7,” she says.

Cheng says the data improves flood warnings and sea-level-rise predictions, and it helps city leaders understand how flooding affects people’s lives.

More Info: New York Sea Grant and SRIatJB

The Science and Resilience Institute @ Jamaica Bay (SRIJB) is a research center focused on enhancing environmental, social, and economic resilience in communities of Jamaica Bay funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the City of New York.

New York Sea Grant (NYSG), a cooperative program of Cornell University and the State University of New York (SUNY), is one of 34 university-based programs under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Sea Grant College Program.

Since 1971, NYSG has represented a statewide network of integrated research, education and extension services promoting coastal community economic vitality, environmental sustainability and citizen awareness and understanding about the State’s marine and Great Lakes resources.

Through NYSG’s efforts, the combined talents of university scientists and extension specialists help develop and transfer science-based information to many coastal user groups—businesses and industries, federal, state and local government decision-makers and agency managers, educators, the media and the interested public.

The program maintains Great Lakes offices at Cornell University, University at Buffalo, SUNY Oswego and the Wayne County Cooperative Extension office in Newark. In the State's marine waters, NYSG has offices at Stony Brook University in Long Island, Brooklyn College and Cornell Cooperative Extension in NYC and Kingston in the Hudson Valley.

For updates on Sea Grant activities: www.nyseagrant.org has RSS, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube links. NYSG offers a free e-list sign up via www.nyseagrant.org/nycoastlines for its flagship publication, NY Coastlines/Currents, which is published quarterly. Our program also produces an occasional e-newsletter,"NOAA Sea Grant's Social Media Review," via its blog, www.nyseagrant.org/blog.