Rodrigo Cienfuegos is director of the Research Centre for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (CIGIDEN) and associate professor at the Department of Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering of the School of Engineering of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He also holds a PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of Grenoble (France) and is a civil hydraulic engineer from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. In his main research area he has contributed to the understanding and modelling of the physical processes of wave and tsunami propagation and their interaction with natural and built environments.

He is currently leading the FONDEF project ID22I10087 Coastal Resilience Monitoring and Anticipation System – SIMONA Costa, to improve the observation capabilities of the evolution of beaches and mouths through remote sensing, and to implement systems for forecasting and anticipation of indicators that are useful for coastal authorities and communities.

In the framework of the ANID/FONDEF ID22I10087 project, a technology has been piloted for monitoring the evolution of coastal systems at high temporal resolution by processing video images. Through the automated analysis of these images, using computer vision tools, it is possible to extract variables of interest such as the coastline.

In this session, the monitoring system and its implementation will be presented, together with an analysis of the information obtained, using the Cáhuil lagoon in the O’Higgins Region as a case study. Finally, it will be shown how the combination of this technology with satellite monitoring at a larger spatial scale can contribute to a better understanding of the processes occurring at the mouths and their relationship with the adjacent beaches.

The seminar will take place on Friday, May 16th at 12:00 PM Chile time (4:00 PM UTC) in the Maryam Mirzakhani Room at the Center for Mathematical Modeling, University of Chile (Beauchef 851, North Building, 6th floor). It will also be live-streamed at this link.