Abstract
Coastal landscape change represents aggregated sediment transport gradients from spatially and temporally variable marine and aeolian forces. Numerous tools exist that independently simulate subaqueous and subaerial coastal profile change in response to these physical forces on a range of time scales. In this capacity, coastal foredunes have been treated primarily as wind-driven features. However, there are several marine controls on coastal foredune growth, such as sediment supply and moisture effects on aeolian processes. To improve understanding of interactions across the land-sea interface, here the development of the new Windsurf-coupled numerical modeling framework is presented. Windsurf couples standalone subaqueous and subaerial coastal change models to simulate the co-evolution of the coastal zone in response to both marine and aeolian processes. Windsurf is applied to a progradational, dissipative coastal system in Washington, USA, demonstrating the ability of the model framework to simulate sediment exchanges between the nearshore, beach, and dune for a one-year period. Windsurf simulations generally reproduce observed cycles of seasonal beach progradation and retreat, as well as dune growth, with reasonable skill. Exploratory model simulations are used to further explore the implications of environmental forcing variability on annual-scale coastal profile evolution. The findings of this work support the hypothesis that there are both direct and indirect oceanographic and meteorological controls on coastal foredune progradation, with this new modeling tool providing a new means of exploring complex morphodynamic feedback mechanisms.
Highlights
Coastal landscape evolution reflects the aggregation of the combined effects of oceanographic, meteorological, geological, ecological, and anthropogenic influences [1]
Eng. 2019, 7, 13 land-sea interface still exist, here we introduce the coupled coastal profile modeling framework Windsurf
The model does not accurately reproduce the changes to the subtidal sandbars (Figure 4). Both subtidal and intertidal sandbars are smoothed during the simulations by XBeach
Summary
Coastal landscape evolution reflects the aggregation of the combined effects of oceanographic, meteorological, geological, ecological, and anthropogenic influences [1]. Dunes backing sandy beaches have largely been treated as wind-controlled features, marine-driven processes play an active role in the accretional and erosional development of these landforms e.g., [8,9]. In part reflecting these complex interactions, quantitative predictions of coastal dune evolution at scales beyond individual storm events are lacking e.g., [10,11] despite the important suite of ecosystem services that coastal dunes provide (e.g., coastal protection, habitat, recreation; [12,13,14,15]). Aeolian transport is the primary driver of coastal foredune growth, in many real-world systems wind climatology is not well correlated with dune growth rates [24,25,26,27], making empirical prediction of dune evolution difficult
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