Abstract
Abstract. The impact of future sea-level rise on coastal erosion as a result of a changing climate has been studied in detail over the past decade. The potential impact of a changing wave climate on erosion rates, however, is not typically considered. We explore the effect of changing wave climates on a pinned, soft-cliff, sandy coastline, using as an example the Holderness coast of East Yorkshire, UK. The initial phase of the study concentrates on calibrating a numerical model to recently measured erosion rates for the Holderness coast using an ensemble of geomorphological and shoreface parameters under an observed offshore wave climate. In the main phase of the study, wave climate data are perturbed gradually to assess their impact on coastal morphology. Forward-modelled simulations constrain the nature of the morphological response of the coast to changes in wave climate over the next century. Results indicate that changes to erosion rates over the next century will be spatially and temporally heterogeneous, with a variability of up to ±25% in the erosion rate relative to projections under constant wave climate. The heterogeneity results from the current coastal morphology and the sediment transport dynamics consequent on differing wave climate regimes.
Highlights
The coastal zone and immediate hinterland is a highly important socio-political domain (Pendleton, 2010)
Our analysis initially examines the spatial distribution of absolute erosion along the Holderness coast, and compares this recession relative to the baseline
When compared with the baseline (Fig. 5b) the results reveal that future erosion rates could either accelerate or slow depending on the nature of the wave climate change
Summary
The coastal zone and immediate hinterland is a highly important socio-political domain (Pendleton, 2010). Numerical modelling, parameterised in part by observational data, is increasingly used to study both coastal processes and the response of coastal evolution to climatic changes, under current conditions and those which might pertain in the future. Whilst well studied and monitored (Scott Wilson, 2009; Quinn et al, 2009; Montreuil and Bullard, 2012), the possible future states of this coastline have received only minimal investigation using numerical modelling (Castedo et al, 2012). In order to investigate how a pinned, soft-cliff, sandy coastline might respond to future changes in hydrodynamic driving processes, and the rates at which such changes may occur, we have applied the numerical coastal evolution model, CEM (Ashton et al, 2001; Ashton and Murray, 2006a, b), to the Holderness coast. Previous work has shown that changing the distribution of wave-approach angles can change the shape of a sandy coastline (Slott et al, 2006; Moore et al, 2013); here we investigate how wave climate change scenarios affect the evolution of a soft-cliff coastline
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