Dr. Charles Flagg is in the air early in 2021! He was able to take a flight over the Breach at Old Inlet on Fire Island on January 8, 2021. The flyover mosaic is available below.
Dr. Flagg provided the latest report (PDF):
At long last we have another aerial overflight of the breach, the first since August and after several fall storms. The full photo mosaics showing the entire flood delta as well as the breach are available from the project website. There have been a couple of significant changes between August and January. The first is that the inlet/exit channel has rotated from the southeast to the southwest. The last time the channel was in this orientation was prior to November, 2016. The other change is that there has been a filling-in on the east side of the breach, cutting off the channel along the eastern interior shoreline as well as expanding into the breach offshore. This filling-in may be the cause of the main channel’s rotation to the southwest and suggests that there may have been an increased alongshore sand transport from the east. There has also been a slight retreat westward of the western shoreline. Just north of the breach there has been a filling-in of the channel north of the remnants of Pelican Island. (Pelican Island is still there, although it is only about twice the size of a dining room table at this point.)
The over-washes to the west of the breach appear to be about the same as they were during the summer of 2020 despite several significant storm events, particularly one that occurred around December 17th which caused a major jump in salinity in Bellport Bay.
Check the report PDF for the full details!
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. The full size image is also available.
For more information, please visit Dr. Charles Flagg’s website.
