Coastline development

This is a draft page

Introduction

In this tool (coastline development) you can compute alongshore sediment transports and shoreline dynamics.
The tool requires a shoreline, cross-shore profile, a wave climate and sediment characteristics (you can inspect the generic data availability in the top panel of the tool).
Breakwaters will also be used in case they are provided. Breakwaters fully block alongshore transports at the nearest coastline grid point.

Alongshore transports are based on either the Kamphuis or CERC alongshore sediment transport formula.

Shoreline dynamics are computed through alongshore transport gradients based on shoreline orientation relative to the wave direction. The computation is performed on a staggered 1-dimensional coastline grid. Transport gradients give rise to shoreline position changes, which in turn results in changing alongshore transports in time.

How to use the tool

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Please be aware that the speed of this tool scales:

Kwadraticly (!) with dx (based on distance of coast and/or number of points N)
Linearly with with the maximum sediment transport in the S-phi curves (non-linearly with Hs and Tp)
Linearly with the number of wave conditions
Linearly with the active height
Linearly with the duration of the computation

E.g.: when increasing both the number of gridpoints and the run-period by a factor 2, the computation will take 8x longer (!)

User input fields

Tool limitations

Note that the following processes are not included: shadow zoning, alongshore varying wave climates, by-passing, etc.
Results in terms of alongshore transports and coastline dynamics should therefore be interpreted with a considerable range uncertainty.

Examples