The Impact of Coastal Development on the Delaware Bay/Sea Breeze

The sea-breeze circulation is a coastal phenomenon that is of great importance to the Delaware community. A sea-breeze front can cause significant changes in wind direction, wind speed, and temperature which can have a notable effect on tourism, coastal currents, and wind power. In the next ten years, the population of Sussex County is expected to grow by almost twenty percent (Delaware Population Consortium). Most of this growth is expected to be in coastal areas. A sea breeze is a mesoscale occurrence that feeds off of the temperature difference of air over the land and the sea. It is expected that the increasing urbanization of Delaware will have an effect on the local sea breeze's intensity, frequency, timing, and propagation distance because of the changing land surface.

The characteristics of the Delaware Bay / Sea Breeze have been investigated using radar data, synoptic maps, weather stations, and the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF). A sea breeze detection algorithm has been developed which scans through selected Delaware Environmental Observing System stations and identifies sea breeze occurrences. The large number of stations per area provides insight into the sea breezes propagation speed, shape and distance of the sea breeze front. WRF has been employed to study the detailed structure of the sea breeze including over the bay and ocean where meteorological data are sparse. WRF will be used to investigate the effects of projected population growth on the Delaware bay/sea breeze by modifying surface properties such as albedo, porosity and surface roughness and analyzing the resulting modeled sea breeze properties.