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Abstract
Extreme storm events and their consequent shoreline changes are of great importance for understanding coastal evolution and assessing storm hazards. This work investigates the fractal properties of the spatial distributions of shoreline changes caused by storms. Wavelet analysis and upper-truncated power law (UTPL) fitting are used to study the power spectra of shoreline changes and to evaluate the upper limits of the cross-shore erosion and accretion. During a period affected by storms, the alongshore shoreline change patterns are strong on the 15 km scale but are weak with lower spectral power on the 20 km scale. The areas adjacent to the eroded shoreline are usually accrete, and the cross-shore extent of erosion is larger than that of accretion when the coast is affected by storms. The fractal properties of shoreline changes due to storms are found to be temporally continuous: the effects of later storms build on the preceding shoreline conditions, including both the effects of previous storms and the subsequent shoreline recoveries. This work provides a new perspective on the various scales of the spatial variations of the morphodynamics of storm-affected shorelines.
Highlights
Fractals are defined as irregular and fragmentary forms, usually exhibiting self-similar patterns[1, 2]
Storms have distinct impacts on the fractal properties of shoreline changes. These impacts include but are not limited to the power spectrum of shoreline changes under the influence of storms deviating from the power-law relationship in a specific scale range via a local reduction in slope and the upper limit of the horizontal shoreline erosion caused by a storm generally being greater than that of accretion
The fractal properties of this change have the potential to identify whether the shoreline change is influenced by the storm
Summary
Fractals are defined as irregular and fragmentary forms, usually exhibiting self-similar patterns[1, 2]. The power-law relationship is not strictly obeyed by natural phenomena[20,21,22,23]; for instance, patterns may be pronounced at some scales[12, 24, 25], and there is usually an upper/lower limit to the scaling of the pattern[26, 27]. Spectral analysis can detect the intensities of patterns at different scales and reveal the dominant pattern and its scale, when it exists For the latter case, an upper-truncated power law (UTPL) introduced by Burroughs & Tebbens[28] can be used to estimate the fractal dimension (D) and upper limitation of object size (rT): N(r) = C(r−D − rT−D),. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to S.C. (email: slchen@ sklec.ecnu.edu.cn) www.nature.com/scientificreports/
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