Abstract
Wind-blown beach sand is the primary source for the volume growth of the most seaward dune, the foredune. Strong wind events can potentially dominate long-term aeolian supply but in reality do not contribute considerably because they often coincide with a storm surge. The aim of this paper is to further our understanding of how a storm surge prevents or severely restricts aeolian supply. Using field data collected on the 1:50 sloping Egmond beach (Netherlands) in the aftermath of a 1-m storm surge, we show that the ground water in the upper beach rose to well above normal levels during the surge, which resulted in the development of a seepage face during falling tide and hence persistent saturation of the emerging beach. Using a fetch-based model, we predicted aeolian supply during the 2-day surge period to be about 66% of the potential supply. Fetch limitations imposed by the surge-induced inundation and the continuous saturation of the sand on the emerging beach both contributed to the predicted supply limitation. Our results quantitatively support earlier studies that suggested surges to be the primary condition that causes predictions of long-term potential foredune growth to overestimate measured growth.
Highlights
Coastal foredunes are common morphological features along the world’s sandy wave-dominated beaches and barrier systems [1,2]
We first focus our attention on the measurements on 6 October (Figure 7), which were performed after the peak in the storm surge on the previous day and night (Figure 2e)
GW7 was submerged during this high tide
Summary
Coastal foredunes are common morphological features along the world’s sandy wave-dominated beaches and barrier systems [1,2]. Their dynamics reflect a sand-sharing system with the neighboring beach. Foredune growth and recovery takes place through the deposition of wind-blown beach sand in vegetation and is a slow process in the sense that it may take seasons, years or longer before a previously eroded volume has been restored [10]. Foredune growth is the cumulative effect of numerous aeolian transport events that differ in magnitude and duration [11]. The potential supply has been shown to match foredune volume growth reasonably well in some cases [14,15,16], it more often exceeds measured growth substantially [12,14,17,18,19]
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