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Introduction
Published in Vanesa Magar, Sediment Transport and Morphodynamics Modelling for Coasts and Shallow Environments, 2020
The study of coastal morphodynamics involves investigating the changes to the physical processes and bedforms in the coastal environment over a broad range of scales in space and time, from the microscale to the macroscale. The motions near the bed are crucial as the bed is one of the most important sources of sediment, together with bedform migration and estuarine discharges. Sediments transported by the flow may be divided into three different transport types depending on their median grain diameter and their dynamics: bedload, suspended load, and wash load. The differences between these three types of sediment load will be explained in Section 1.1.1 on microscale processes. The types and concentrations of the sediments will strongly depend on the coastal environment, which may be classified into three simple types: sandy or pebbled coasts, erodible or nonerodible bluffs and cliffs, or sheltered low-lying lands and estuaries. Such environments may extend from tens, to hundreds, to thousands of meters and therefore may be affected by submesoscale, mesoscale, or macroscale processes. The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) defines six different beach settings, representative of the settings generally found on the Pacific coast of the US, according to their morphology and vulnerability to storms (FEMA 2015).
Analysis of shoreline changes in Vishakhapatnam coastal tract of Andhra Pradesh, India: an application of digital shoreline analysis system (DSAS)
Published in Annals of GIS, 2020
Mirza Razi Imam Baig, Ishita Afreen Ahmad, Mohammad Tayyab, Atiqur Rahman
The shoreline computation is one of the most important parameters in detection of coastal erosion and deposition as well as the study of coastal morphodynamics (Armenio et al. 2019). Shoreline lines are the interface between land and sea, which changes erratically in response to one or more factors, like morphological, climatic or geological factors in nature (Mujabar and Chandrasekar 2013). As a borderline between the land and sea, the shorelines are subject to continuous change due to their dynamic environmental setting (Mentaschi et al. 2018). The shoreline features depends on the interactions between and among waves, tides, rivers, storms, tectonic and physical processes dynamically (Passeri et al. 2015). Vulnerability of coastal area increases due to the erosion which can be risky to the human activities along the coasts. In addition, the rising number of coastal disaster makes the coasts highly vulnerable and susceptible changes (Saxena, Geethalakshmi, and Lakshmanan 2013). It is one of the most dynamic landform types of the earth (Sparks 1990) which changes rapidly depending on geology, geomorphology and wave action along the coastline as well as periodic storms, sea level, rise, sediment transport by long shore currents and anthropogenic activities (Carter and Woodroffe 1997; Zhang, Xie, and Liu 2011).