USGS CoastCam at DUNEX: Timestack Imagery and Coordinate Data

Two digital video cameras were temporarily installed at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge (PINWR) in North Carolina (NC), as part of the DUring Nearshore Event eXperiment (DUNEX). DUNEX was a collaborative community-led experiment that took place in the fall of 2021 along the Outer Banks of NC, with the goal of improving the understanding, observational techniques, and predictive capabilities for extreme storm processes and impacts within the coastal environment. At the USFWS PINWR site, cameras were deployed for about a month, from September 18 to October 24, 2021, during which several storms passed offshore of the site. The cameras were mounted on separate 7-meter (m) tall masts within the dune, facing northeast and offshore, in a stereo configuration with approximately 75% overlap in field of view, to measure shoreline water levels and coincident topographic beach profiles. Images were collected during daylight hours with two schemes: 1) both cameras recording at 1 Hertz (Hz) for 5 minutes (min) starting 10 min before the hour for stereo photogrammetric processing to measure topographic beach profiles, and 2) one camera recording at 2 Hz for 17 min starting at the top of the hour for producing snapshots and time-averaged image products used to measure wave runup. One such product is a "runup timestack", which is created by sampling a cross-shore array of pixels from an image through time as waves propagate towards and run up a beach. Runup timestacks store the red, green, and blue or monochrome pixel intensity as a function of the cross-shore position for the sampling time period. This data release includes timestack imagery, including coordinates in image, local, and world reference frames, which allow for quantitative measurements to be made. The cameras are part of a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) research project to study the beach and nearshore environment. USGS researchers utilize the timestack imagery collected from these cameras to remotely sense information such as wave runup. This camera is part of the USGS CoastCam network. To learn more about the DUNEX camera deployment visit https://www.usgs.gov/centers/whcmsc/science/dunex-pea-island-experiment.