Time series of lidar data, acquired over the past decade along the North American East Coast, provide opportunities to gain new insights into 3D evolution of barrier islands and their beach and dune systems. GIS-based per grid cell statistics and map algebra was applied to time series of Digital Surface Models representing two sections of North Carolina barrier islands to quantify elevation change trends, map dynamic and stable locations, identify new and lost buildings, measure relative volume evolution in the beach and foredune systems and analyze shoreline dynamics. Results show a relatively small stable core in both study areas, with beaches and the ocean side of the dunes exhibiting systematic high rates of elevation loss while areas landward from the dunes increase slightly in elevation. Significant number of new homes have been built at locations with very small core surface elevation, and homes built within the shoreline dynamics band have already been lost. The raster-based methodology used in this study can be applied to perform similar analyses in other coastal areas where time series of lidar data are available.
Understanding the processes that take place during a storm leading to coastal morphological change has been a challenging topic for coastal engineers. Over the years, many models have been developed to predict the coastal response to storms evolving from the one dimensional empirical models to two or three dimensional process based models. We hypothesized that the predictive capacity of these models can be improved by incorporating the site specific effect of the land cover features that are in place at the time of the storm. In this work, we present a case study of the development of the Pea Island breach, Outer Banks, North Carolina during Hurricane Irene in August 2011. The inclusion of the land cover effects into the model significantly improves the predictive capability of the model results.
Storm surge is known to be the source of many coastal problems including dune erosion, overwash deposits and inlet breaching. The work discussed in this paper arises out of an effort to develop geospatial tools and workflows that integrate with process based numerical models in order to improve the understanding of the importance of landform and complex landform changes in these processes building on the use of existing models. The effects of landform changes on calculation of storm surge characteristics (elevation and velocity) are investigated for three different cases created using the geospatial workflows coupled with ADCIRC modeling efforts.
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