Residents From Californian Coast Help Map Out El Nino-Inundated Areas

Scientists are looking to the communities of California to help out with the mapping of the El Nino flooding.

According to the Associated Press, the initiative started this month, and the Nature Conservancy asked residents to use their smartphones and drones to document the coastline's flooding. The project serves as a way to spread public awareness about the changing look of the coast.

"We use these projected models and they don't quite look right, but we're lacking any empirical evidence," said Matt Merrifield, the chief of the organization. "This is essentially a way of 'ground truthing' those models."

El Nino serves to show that if sea levels continue to rise, 4.6 feet to be exact, the population of California would lose much of their coast, and the state would lose hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure damage and inundation.

"When you get big winter storm surge like they want to document, you tend to lose a lot of beach," said Merrifield. "In a way, it's like doing a documentary on the future. It'll show you what your beaches will look like in 100 years."

The mapping won't be able to predict what beaches will lose ground, said Lesley Ewing, senior coastal engineer with the California Coastal Commission. "We're not going to capture that change," she said. "We're going to capture where the water could go to with this current landscape and that's still a very important thing to understand because it gets at those hot spots."

Volunteers haven't been given assignments yet, but project organizers are planning to send out requests as the winter progresses. The organization believes that if 10 to 15 percent of California's 840-mile-long coastline were mapped, the project would be a success.

The Nature Conservancy partnered with DroneDeploy. DroneDeploy will provide a free application to drone owners that will feed users with automated flight patterns.