Analysis of Rip-Channel Formation at an Idealized Beach in the Framework of Coastal Sediment Connectivity
H. Shafiei (TU Delft - Coastal Engineering)
Stuart G. Pearson (TU Delft - Coastal Engineering)
A. J.H.M. Reniers (TU Delft - Environmental Fluid Mechanics)
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Abstract
Tracking coastal sediments can provide useful information about coastal dynamics, thereby helping coastal management. However, the highly dynamic conditions of the coasts makes analyzing the trajectories of a huge number of particles challenging. To solve this limitation, the framework of coastal sediment connectivity is designed. In this framework, recent advances in graph theory are used to quantify coastal systems as complex networks. In this context, sediment sinks/sources and pathways represent the graphical nodes and links, respectively. In this work, we take the first step to evaluate the ability of this newly-developed framework in quantifying the basic processes on a sandy beach. Firstly, we used Delft3D to obtain the velocity field and bed-level changes. Then, the Eulerian results were fed into SedTRAILS to simulate the sediment pathways. We show that the current version of the model can correctly calculate the basic metrics of the sediment-connectivity network (e.g., network link strength which is a proxy for sediment fluxes). More specifically, we show that this framework is capable of exploring the initiation of the rip channel formation.
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