Impact of a sandy shore morphology on overtopping

Abstract

An objective of the project MOSAIC.pt is to develop an operational forecasting system for coastal flooding capable of accounting for storm driven morphodynamics. The developed system relies on the OPENCoastS architecture for downscaling North-Atlantic metocean conditions at any local beach or waterfront (Oliveira et al., 2021). The downscaled conditions then serve to force local applications of XBeach (Roelvink et al., 2018), in 2DH and using its surfbeat hydrodynamic solver. Based on hydro- and geomorphological data collected within the project (Freire et al., 2020), an application was setup and validated for the waterfront of Cova-Gala, south of the entrance to the Figueira da Foz harbour. The system runs for now with or without morphological evolution over 48-hour periods. So it is important to quantify the errors induced by geomorphological changes over longer timescales.