Wave Chronology Effects on Long-Term Shoreline Erosion Predictions

Abstract

This note presents some initial analysis of the chronology effect on critical shoreline erosion statistics using a recently developed numerical model. A 16-year hindcast wave data set from the East Coast of England was used as input to the model, and simulations were carried out for a 4-year subset of the data. By comparing predictions obtained using a number of alternative methods to generate the input-wave time series, the influence of wave climate statistics and wave sequencing on shoreline erosion predictions were clarified. The computational results have shown that the shoreline evolution was primarily a wave-climate-dependent process for both short and long terms. It was also found that the prediction of the long-term wave chronology effect on the shoreline erosion statistics is affected little by the methods used to generate the input-wave time series as long as the long-shore and cross-shore recessions have distinctly different time scales and can be evaluated separately.