Modelling Cross-Shore Shoreline Change on Multiple Timescales and Their Interactions

• Main Authors: Rob Schepper, Rafael Almar, Erwin Bergsma, Sierd de Vries, Ad Reniers, Mark Davidson, Kristen Splinter
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-05-01
• Series: Journal of Marine Science and Engineering
• Subjects: equilibrium shoreline modelling; ShoreFor; cross-shore sediment transport; multiple timescales
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/9/6/582

In this paper, a new approach to model wave-driven, cross-shore shoreline change incorporating multiple timescales is introduced. As a base, we use the equilibrium shoreline prediction model ShoreFor that accounts for a single timescale only. High-resolution shoreline data collected at three distinctly different study sites is used to train the new data-driven model. In addition to the direct forcing approach used in most models, here two additional terms are introduced: a time-upscaling and a time-downscaling term. The upscaling term accounts for the persistent effect of short-term events, such as storms, on the shoreline position. The downscaling term accounts for the effect of long-term shoreline modulations, caused by, for example, climate variability, on shorter event impacts. The multi-timescale model shows improvement compared to the original ShoreFor model (a normalized mean square error improvement during validation of 18 to 59%) at the three contrasted sandy beaches. Moreover, it gains insight in the various timescales (storms to inter-annual) and reveals their interactions that cause shoreline change. We find that extreme forcing events have a persistent shoreline impact and cause 57–73% of the shoreline variability at the three sites. Moreover, long-term shoreline trends affect short-term forcing event impacts and determine 20–27% of the shoreline variability.