Emulator For Eroded Beach And Dune Profiles Due To Storms

Abstract

Beaches and dunes are both natural and engineered defenses for communities on sandy coasts. Their capacity to protect is affected by environmental drivers occurring at a range of timescales, including extreme storms, changes in sand supply, sea level rise, wave climate variability, and anthropogenic management (Hanley et al., 2014). Extreme storm events with high waves and elevated water levels can change beaches on timescales of several hours to days (Cohn et al., 2019;Splinter et al., 2018), typically removing considerable volumes of sand from the subaerial beach and dune face to deeper portions of the offshore profile (Gallagher et al., 1998). Predicting beach response to storm waves on varying time horizons is a primary research need of the nearshore scientific community (Elko et al., 2014), motivated by the recognition that global warming-induced sea level rise will exacerbate storm impacts and require mitigation strategies to protect communities and infrastructure (Bongarts Lebbe et al., 2021).Storm impacts are predicted with models that account for a range of complexities, including qualitative frameworks (Sallenger, 2000), data-driven models (Beuzen, Harley, et al., 2019), and process-based approaches that are either empirical or fully physics-based (Sherwood et al., 2022). Simple approaches may track a particular contour (i.e., shoreline models (Yates et al., 2009)) or changes in a particular feature (i.e., dune crest height or dune toe retreat (Palmsten & Holman, 2012)), while physics-based numerical models such as the eXtreme

Morphodynamic Behaviour of a Mediterranean Intermittent Estuary with Opening Phases Primarily Dominated by Offshore Winds

“…The influence of high-energy marine conditions where waves cause breaching by overwash and overtopping [3,31,32]; 4.…”