Longshore Sediment Transport along the Coast of Kerala in Southwest India

Abstract

Accurate estimation of longshore sediment transport (LST) along the entire coastal stretch of Kerala is challenging as the sediment transport pattern varies both spatially and temporally depending on the nearshore wave climate, nearshore bedslope, shoreline orientation, coastal morphology, presence of hard structures etc. While majority of the locations show a net northerly drift, there are certain stretches of the coast which are dominated by southerly transport. For the estimation of longshore sediment transport the three commonly used formulae viz. CERC (SPM (1984)), Van Rijn (1991) and Kamphuis (2002) were considered. After detailed analysis of the computed LST results for different sectors of the coast using these formulae, the formula of Kamphuis (2002) which considers all the important parameters like the nearshore bed slope, sediment grain size and peak wave period in addition to the usual input parameters like the wave breaker height and wave breaker angle was selected as the most appropriate one. To understand the spatial and temporal variation in the LST pattern along the Kerala coast, the LST rates for eight important locations - viz. Trivandrum, Quilon, Aleppey, Andhakaranazhi, Nattika, Calicut, Kannur and Kasargod spread along the Kerala coast were computed adopting the Kamphuis (2002) formula. For computation of the LST rates for the eight locations, the one year site specific nearshore wave data derived from numerical model studies was used. For validation, the results were compared with that of the earlier estimations available in literature. It was observed that even though the net magnitude was of the same range, there were deviations in the direction. However, when the results were compared with field observations (where morphological indicators were used) a reasonable agreement could also be established for the directions. The net annual longshore sediment transport was found to vary between 0.32 x 105 m3 and 2.3 x 105 m3 along the Kerala coast and the net transport direction was pre-dominantly northerly for almost all the locations selected for the study. The maximum gross sediment transport of 12.85 x 105 m3 was obtained for Trivandrum but the net transport for this station was much less, and therefore comparable with other locations.