Support MWA’s Waterfront Action Agenda!

Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance’s “Waterfront Action Agenda.” HarborLAB enthusiastically supports these integrated goals for a flourishing estuarine archipelago city.

The Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance is our region’s most dynamic and effective advocate for reviving the economic and ecological potential of our waterways. This inclusive network promotes waterborne transportation for commuters and cargo, while also supporting habitat restoration and sustainable recreation, like paddling. The MWA’s Waterfront Action Agenda synthesizes this comprehensive vision and outlines achievable goals. This five-point program grew out of work by the MWA’s urban planning staff and from ideas that bubbled up from the hundreds of harbor stakeholders that the MWA brings together.

If you want your organization to be part of this community, sign up here to join the MWA and benefit from conferences, events, seminars, community meetings, workshops, calls to action, and Waterwire newsletter.

Please let your elected officials know you support the Waterfront Action Agenda. Not sure who represents you? The League of Women Voters’ online district locator will guide you. No need to know your nearest buoy, just punch in your zip code!

 

 

 

Clearwater Festival and City of Water Day!

cwcowd

 

Wonderful news! Thanks to our volunteers’ fantastic service last year, the two largest annual water ecology festivals in the metropolitan area have asked HarborLAB back to provide their public programs in 2014! Join us in Croton Point State Park in the Hudson River Valley for the Clearwater Festival on June 21 and June 22 and on Governors Island in the center of our harbor for City of Water Day on July 12!

Types of Fog

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

—  Carl Sandburg, 1916

Gothamist has been obsessing over fog this season, and for good reason. These beautiful cloud colonizations of the understory highlight our city’s skyscraper peaks and shroud our harbor in mystery and danger.

The National Weather Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, explains that what we experience is called “advection fog,” which is generated by “the horizontal movement of warm moist air over a cold surface. This means that advection fog can sometimes be distinguished from radiation fog by its horizontal motion along the ground. Sea fogs are always advection fogs, because the oceans don’t radiate heat in the same way as land and so never cool sufficiently to produce radiation fog. Fog forms at sea when warm air associated with a warm current drifts over a cold current and condensation takes place.”

Learn about the different types of fog from this National Weather Service educational page.

 

Shooters Island, Along the Staten Island Circ

Shooters Island in the Arthur Kill, from Bayonne Bridge. Wikimedia Commons.

 

One highlight of the summer will be HarborLAB’s circumnavigation of Staten Island. This video about Shooters Island illuminates the “secret” historical significance of even one little harbor heron refuge along the way. Drifting past that sleepy island today, it’s hard to imagine that mobs surrounding a Prussian prince, Teddy Roosevelt, and Thomas Edison bent its planks. Many thanks to artist and kayaker Harry Spitz for pointing out this video.