The bimodal wave climate of the semi-protected shallow Gulf St Vincent in South Australia has been analyzed through a forty-year (1980-2020) wave hindcast and an investigation into the climatic drivers of wave climate anomalies is presented. The sea and swell partitions of the wave climate were modelled independently as well as using an integrated model with both partitions represented. The wave hindcast was validated against two wave buoys located off the coast of Adelaide’s metropolitan beaches and key wave parameter anomalies were calculated across the gulf. Teleconnections were investigated, and the Southern Annular Mode is found to have the strongest correlations to wave parameter anomalies while the Southern Oscillation Index and the Dipole Mode Index fluctuations are found to correlate seasonally with wave parameter anomalies. Projected future trends of these climate drivers from literature have been related to the teleconnections found in this study to inform future trends of bimodal wave conditions in the gulf. The Southern Annular Mode is projected to trend positive which will reduce wave height and the westerly component of waves in the gulf, while the Southern Oscillation Index is projected to become more variable in the future which will lead to more extreme winter and spring wave conditions. An understanding of these trends allows coastal managers to pre-emptively manage the impacts of waves on the coastline at a seasonal to annual basis and provides insight into future wave conditions beyond these time periods.

Coastal aeolian sediment transport is influenced by supply-limiting factors caused by sediment sorting by grain size. Sorting processes can lead to coarsening of the bed surface and influence the formation of aeolian ripples. However, the influence sorting processes and bedforms might have on the magnitude of the transport is not fully understood. This study explores sorting processes and their influence on the magnitude and mode of aeolian transport by using sediment tracers. Sand was painted in different colors according to particle size and placed on a supratidal beach in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. Several experiments were conducted with varying wind speeds. Surface sampling and cameras tracked the sand color movement on the bed surface, and wind velocity was measured. The tracer experiments showed that ripples developed in moderate wind conditions. Once the ripples had formed, the supply of finer tracer grains in the downwind direction decreased over time, while the supply of coarser grains remained constant. A linear relationship between ripple migration speed and wind speed was found. For higher wind speeds, no ripples or differences in transport of grain size fractions were observed. Instead, alternating phases of erosion and deposition of the bed surface were observed, which could not be related to local variations in wind velocity. Based on these results and literature, a conceptual model was developed for an active bed surface layer with two transport regimes corresponding to moderate (I) and high (II) wind speeds. The conceptual model is intended to guide the selection of aeolian sediment transport models as a function of wind speed, bed characteristics, and upwind sediment supply. For Regime I, transport could be modeled using a linear relationship between sediment transport and wind speed and for Regime II using a third power relationship in combination with a process-based model accounting for supply limitations.