A STORM CLASSIFICATION BASED ON THE BEACH EROSION POTENTIAL IN THE CATALONIAN COAST

摘要

Storms along the Catalonian coast previously classified in terms of their energy content are re-analyzed to take into account their erosion potential effects on the coast. This was done in two-step procedure. The first step consists in modeling their effects on two representative beach profiles by using SBEACH. The coastal response was characterized through two bulk erosion parameters, beach retreat and eroded volume. In the second step, the effort was devoted to look for a parametric way to estimate the storm erosion potential in such a way that by simply using synthetic information on storm characteristics, similar bulk erosion values to the obtained by using SBEACH be obtained. To do this, several beach profile change dimensionless predictors were tested. Although the use of some of these predictors gave reasonable predictions, it was found that the inclusion of the storm duration was a key variable to reduce the scatter in the response. Moreover, to properly reproduce reflective and dissipative beach profile erosion, predictors explicitly including beach slope have to be used. Here we propose to use the JA parameter multiplied by the storm duration. Using the JA t parameter a final 5-classes scale based on the erosion potential and beach retreat ranging from I (lowest erosion potential) to V (highest erosion potential) was obtained.