Old Dominion University Partners With Hampton Roads Community Foundation to Speed Severe Weather Recovery
ODU researchers have received a five-year $500,000 grant from the Hampton Roads Community Foundation to help vulnerable communities quickly restore damaged homes following severe storms and flooding. The research team will begin by creating a Convergence, Inventory, Matching & Assignment (CIMA) platform. The tool will help by matching available resources, volunteer labor, and repair work packages to homes in need based on damage assessments. In the future, this innovative platform may help other coastal areas around the country best manage their recovery efforts.
Tracking Coastal Currents Using Drones
Research scientists at the Old Dominion University Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography have begun using drones to aid in their efforts to monitor coastal currents. Teresa Updike, a researcher at ODU, manages 6 of the radio stations where monitoring data is recorded. In the past, Updike and researchers like her would need to send out a boat as a reference point in order to calibrate the equipment at these radio stations. Recently, however, she and her team have borrowed a technique used by radar operators at the University of California Santa Barbara. They now rely on drones carrying a small transmitter to calibrate their radio stations. Not only is this method less time consuming but it is more affordable. So far, this method has been used to calibrate 12 radio stations around the Chesapeake Bay.