Published works

The Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC project, Resilience to Clustered Disaster Events on the Coast – Storm Surge proposes to develop a beach profile or shoreline evolution model appropriate for assessing the behaviour of selected beaches to clustered storm events.

This paper outlines the characteristics required of an appropriate model and reviews literature and model results to determine if existing approaches include the required physics and can be embedded within a suitable statistical framework for a stochastic analysis. It is anticipated a priori that a hybrid model approach will be required, utilizing existing process models in a new model suite. A discussion of modelling approaches is provided, together with a justification of the model proposed for the project.

The chosen model, with appropriate refinements and modifications, will be applied at two case study sites; Old Bar (NSW) and Adelaide Beaches (SA). This review focuses on models that can be applied at these field sites within the constraints imposed by the available data. These data are summarized in a previous report - Identified data on study sites: Old Bar and Adelaide Beaches Geoscience Australia (2015), IDSS henceforth.

Coincident with the model development, will be the development of a model framework for its implementation. These potential approaches for model and modelling frameworks are discussed in this paper. This modular separation of the model and model framework allows for an iterative development
approach where refinements can be made as they are required.

While the overarching aim is to develop a model and model framework that accurately quantifies erosional risk at these study sites, the approach should be transportable to other coastal sites of interest. Even in the development stage we may include third site at Narrabeen beach due to its rich data history and relative close proximity to the Old Bar site. Furthermore the authors have an active study site at Wooli beach where we also expect to test the model. 

This report is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the requirements of the model with regard to the coastal processes characteristic of the field sites and outlines the basic model types for coastal morphodynamic modelling. Section 3 reviews general coastal morphodynamic modelling and lists specific models considered to potentially suit the project aims and discusses the merits of each with respect to the dominant coastal sediment processes at the two field sites. Section 4 provides details on common statistical modelling frameworks and those considered for this study. A concluding discussion and preliminary recommendation for the model and model framework are presented in section 5.