Reduced wave time series for long-term morphodynamic applications

Abstract

Shoreline models have usually been recognized by professionals as the most appropriate tool for reproducing the long-term morphodynamic evolution of the shoreline of sandy beaches. Despite their underlying simplifications, the simulation of shoreline evolution at large temporal and spatial scales may imply significant computational efforts. Hence, to reduce computational costs, many approaches aimed to optimize the size of the input wave datasets have been proposed so far. A simplified novel method to reduce long-term offshore wave series is proposed herein. The rationale of the approach is to build reduced series that induce the same morphodynamic effects in the long-term as the ones induced by the whole, and more computationally expensive, original series. The method is conceived to define offshore reduced time series with the same chronological order of the complete series and is able to represent the bi-modal features of the wave climate. In-depth hydrodynamic and morphodynamic parametric analyses have been performed and it has been demonstrated that the method is capable to get reliable reduced offshore wave time series for reproducing the long-term evolution of sandy beaches with decreased computational costs.