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Tropical cyclones and other extreme coastal storms cause widespread interruption and damage to meteorological and hydrological measurement stations exactly when researchers need them most. There is a longstanding need to collect collocated and synchronized measurements in areas where storms severely damage civil/coastal infrastructure. To fill this observational gap, researchers led by author Masters developed a state-of-the-art monitoring station called a “Sentinel.” Sentinels are intended for temporary installation on the beach between the mean tidal datum and the sand dunes and are engineered to operate in and measure extreme wind, storm surge, wave, and hazardous water quality conditions. They are envisioned as a shared-use resource—a hardened IoT (Internet of Things) platform set up in the right place at the right time to study wind and wave loads, coastal erosion and morphology changes, water quality, and other processes during extreme coastal storms. 

The citizen Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse (CATE) Experiment was a new type of citizen science experiment designed to capture a time sequence of white-light coronal observations during totality from 17:16 to 18:48 UT on 2017 August 21. Using identical instruments the CATE group imaged the inner corona from 1 to 2.1 RSun with 1.″43 pixels at a cadence of 2.1 s. A slow coronal mass ejection (CME) started on the SW limb of the Sun before the total eclipse began. An analysis of CATE data from 17:22 to 17:39 UT maps the spatial distribution of coronal flow velocities from about 1.2 to 2.1 RSun, and shows the CME material accelerates from about 0 to 200 km s⁻¹across this part of the corona. This CME is observed by LASCO C2 at 3.1–13 RSun with a constant speed of 254 km s⁻¹. The CATE and LASCO observations are not fit by either constant acceleration nor spatially uniform velocity change, and so the CME acceleration mechanism must produce variable acceleration in this region of the corona.