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Snap A King Tide Photo To 'Face The Future' With State Contest This Weekend

Annie Ropeik
/
NHPR

The Seacoast will get multiple king tides that top 10 feet in the next few days, and residents can take photos and videos of the tides' effects for an annual state contest that runs Saturday through Tuesday.

This kind of high tide tends to cause low-level flooding in the streets of ocean-facing towns like Hampton, and in the waterfront parks of Great Bay communities like Dover.

Resilience project manager Nathalie Morison DiGeronimo of the state coastal program says the goal of the annual photo contest is to raise public awareness of the effects of rising seas, “and help communities visualize and plan for … increasingly frequent and severe high tide flooding.”

In 2018, she says Hampton had 143 days with tides above 10 feet. That's nearly 40% of the year. She says the state is only just starting to analyze that kind of data on how local tide patterns are changing.

"But other longer-term gauges and satellites do show that sea levels are rising,” Morison DiGeronimo says.

She says the Seavey's Island and Portland Maine tide gauges between 7.5 and 8 inches of sea level rise overall in the last century. The Seacoast’s tidal waters could rise several feet in the coming decades due to the escalating effects of climate change.

Credit N.H. Coastal Program

Annie has covered the environment, energy, climate change and the Seacoast region for NHPR since 2017. She leads the newsroom's climate reporting project, By Degrees.
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