A Guide to Modeling Coastal Morphology

Process-based morphodynamic modelling is one of the relatively new tools at the disposal of coastal scientists, engineers and managers. On paper it offers the possibility to analyse morphological processes and to investigate the effects of various measures one might consider to alleviate some problem. For this to be true in practice, a model should be relatively straightforward to set up. It should be fine enough to represent the details of interest, it should run long enough and robustly to see the real effects happen, and the physical processes should be represented in such a way that the sediment generally goes in the right direction at the right rate. Next, we must be able to judge if the patterns and outcomes of the model are realistic and finally, we have to translate nice colour pictures and vector plots to integrated parameters that are relevant to the client or end user. This book provides an in-depth review of ways to model coastal processes, including many hands-on exercises.