January 6, 2016 Flight
January 31, 2016 Flight
Dr. Charles Flagg took flights over the Breach at Old Inlet on Fire Island on January 6, 2016 and January 31, 2016. Due to technical issues with the capture, a full mosaic image from the January 6th flight is not available. However, the flyover mosaic for the January 31, 2016 is available below. Between the January 6th and the January 31st flights a Nor’easter moved through the area.
Dr. Flagg provided the following report:
Overall, there hasn’t been the large increase in the width of the breach that we might have expected from the magnitude of the blizzard winds. There wasn’t much erosion of the western shore, the January 6th and 31st photos look very similar in that area. The major change is that the storm cleared out a lot of the sand between Fire Island and Pelican Island. And in addition to stretching out the ebb shoal almost to HoHum beach, the odd little island that has appeared offshore at low tide just west of the inlet, seems to have been removed.
Mark Lang has assembled all the geo-referenced photo mosaics into a kml file that can be viewed using Google Earth. By clicking between images and using the fade in-out button you can clearly see how the inlet is changing with time. An offline version of the KML file is available as KMZ.
For more information, please visit Dr. Charles Flagg’s website.
Below is a partial mosaic of the January 6, 2016 Flight (top image), including a closer look at the area of the breach (lower image). Click the image to view larger.
