Mission
The AWLW steering committee will establish a framework for a sustained collaborative team consisting of state and federal agencies, local governing entities, non-profits, private businesses, and communities to:
- Enable the effective and efficient sharing of information.
- Foster leveraging of available resources.
- Provide improved services to mutual customers.
- Provide assistance in identifying and prioritizing actions to fill water level monitoring gaps.
- Promote advancement of water level sensing technologies for use in Alaska’s coastal waters.
AWLW activities are viewable at the mapped build-out plan.
Vision
Increase public access to water level data and products through innovative technologies and collaborative partnerships and to expand the coastal water level observation capacity across Alaska’s coastline.
Guidance Plan
Alaska Water Level Watch 2020-2025 Guidance Plan
Steering Committee
Jacquelyn Overbeck
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration Office for Coastal Management (committee lead)
Jacquelyn Overbeck is the Alaska Regional Geospatial Coordinator with the NOAA Office for Coastal Management. Overbeck provides technical assistance and coordination support for Alaska coastal geospatial projects and initiatives including the NOAA Digital Coast. She brings to bare years of experience working with Alaska Native communities on flood and erosion hazards and coastal mapping across the state using remote sensing, GNSS surveying, and community-based monitoring techniques. Overbeck coordinates coastal mapping and water level priorities and projects, contributes to online tools to communicate coastal vulnerability, and provides scientific guidance to federal and state agencies, non-profits, and Indigenous organizations to inform hazard mitigation, community planning, and relocation strategies for communities facing reductions in sea ice cover and concentration during fall storms and thawing permafrost of ice rich coastlines.
Carol Janzen
Alaska Ocean Observing System
Timothy Steffen
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
National Weather Service
Jason Lehto and Steve Bassett
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
Center for Operational Oceanographic Products & Services
Nathan Wardwell
Management Association of Private Photogrammetric Surveyors and Managing Partner, JOA Surveys, LLC
Mr. Nathan Wardwell is Managing Partner of JOA Surveys LLC, a small business located in Anchorage, Alaska that specializes in measuring water levels for tidal datum determinations. He began his career as an intern for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) measuring stream discharge and sediment transport around Alaska’s Cook Inlet. Nathan received a Bachelors of Science in Environmental Science from Alaska Pacific University and a Master’s of Science from the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (UNH-CCOM). His graduate research included the use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and a mobile platform for offshore geoid model validation. While at UNH-CCOM he had the opportunity to participate in UNCLOS Law of the Sea surveys of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.
Nathan served as chair of the University of Alaska Anchorage Geomatics Advisory Board from 2016 to 2018 and has been a member of the Alaska Water Level Water Steering Committee since 2019. He was a member of The Hydrographic Society of America’s Education Committee and an expert contributor to the International Hydrographic Office’s Hydrographic Surveys Working Group.
As a field technician at the beginning of his career he was a member of a team that installed 5 long term tide stations in Alaska for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Water Level Observation Network. In 2013 he became the Director of an Environmental Field Services contract with NOAA’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services and has managed an effort to collect tidal and GNSS observations at more than 200 locations along the coasts of the U.S. and its territories for the National Ocean Service’s VDatum Program.
In 2022 Nathan received tentative approval for appointment to the NOAA’s Hydrographic Services Review Panel Federal Advisory Committee.