Statistical simulation of wave climate and extreme beach erosion

Recent developments in extreme values modelling have been used to develop a framework for determining the coastal erosion hazard on sandy coastlines. This framework quantitatively reproduced the extreme beach erosion volumes obtained from field measurements at Narrabeen Beach, Australia. This encouraging finding was achieved using Kriebel and Dean's [Kriebel, D.L. and Dean, R.G., 1993. Convolution method for time-dependent beach profile response. Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal and Ocean Engineering, 119(2): 204-226.] simple beach erosion and accretion model. The method includes allowances for joint probability between all basic erosion variates including; wave height, period and direction, event duration, tidal anomalies and event spacing. A new formulation for the dependency between wave height and period has been developed. It includes the physical wave steepness limitation. Event grouping, where significantly more erosion can occur from two closely spaced storms is handled by temporally simulating the synthetic wave climate and the resulting beach erosion and accretion. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.