Research at Weitzman: Allison Lassiter on SaltCast

From mitigating climate change to protecting cultural heritage and combatting social inequality, Weitzman faculty members are engaged with the most pressing issues in the built environment that we face today. Research at Weitzman tracks developments in the lab and in the field.
 

As sea levels rise and land-use patterns change, surface water is increasingly vulnerable to saltwater intrusion. With a team of researchers in a variety of disciplines, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning Allison Lassiter is working to develop a tool to forecast salinity in tidal rivers and estuaries. The group is one of 16 teams working on water issues through the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program, aimed at bringing emerging science from academia into public use. As part of the grant, which was awarded earlier this year, Lassiter and her fellow researchers are meant to build a usable product rather than a series of publications. Kanika Kumar, a master’s student in the Integrated Product Design Program, is working with Lassiter on the research.

What’s the tool you’re working on and who would be using that tool?

The product is called SaltCast. It forecasts salinity levels in tidal rivers and estuaries from the next day to the next century. We expect anyone who uses coastal freshwater to be interested in the outputs of the tool, along with people who are responsible for building or maintaining coastal infrastructure that might be exposed to corrosion associated with salinity. Potential users would be people like water suppliers, fishery managers, farmers, but it could also be things like public managers for towns or town engineers. It could be somebody overseeing a port. Though, we’re hoping to build out the tool with a federal partner, rather than cultivating a lot of different small entities. We’ve talked to people from local, state and federal governments.

How would this tool add to their understanding of the challenges of salinity?

Salt and salinity is an emerging climate change issue that’s really not on everyone’s consciousness. Some of the people I thought would be really interested in using the tool are not as interested as I hoped they would be. There are two parts to using the data. One is being interested in it—you have to be primed already with the knowledge that this is something that’s a threat that’s worth paying attention to. The second part is having the ability to integrate the data into your institutional processes. If there’s going to be a spike in salinity, are you going to be prepared to behave differently? I think both of these things are still under development.

You mentioned salinity is an emerging concern in climate change. What’s the timeliness of this project? Could this tool help people get ahead of these issues?

We hope so. Last year there was an emergency in the Mississippi River where salt was creeping up the river toward the drinking water supply in New Orleans. Nobody had really seen that coming and people were not prepared for it. There was this last-minute scramble to try to protect freshwater supplies — laying pipes to reach further upstream, there was a discussion of bringing in emergency water, renting desalination facilities. It was a federally declared disaster and it was an expensive scramble. The hope is that we can help other places avoid these sorts of issues. We can run forecasts and predictions that can help identify where these problems will be in the future, and people could use that data to figure out things they could do to prepare.

What have been the most challenging and rewarding aspects of the research?

The most challenging aspect is that we are tasked with making sure the tool lives on beyond the life of the grant, which means we need to find customers or an agency to fold it into their operations or some long-term sustainable financing model. There are a lot of people interested in salt. There are fewer people, it seems, that are ready to take action on it immediately. So finding those partners is tricky. We’ve interviewed about 40 people and we’ll do lots more interviews in phase two. I’m still confident we’ll break through, but it’s not been straightforward.

The rewarding thing is that it’s a really interdisciplinary team of oceanographers, hydrologists, biogeochemists, social scientists, designers, computer scientists. It’s a very complex problem and this sort of modeling has not been done before in part because bringing together this expertise is a tall order. It’s been wonderful to work with the team and begin to make progress on providing data to help people deal with what we think is going to be a big issue ahead of us.