Integration of beach hydrodynamic and morphodynamic modelling in a GIS environment

摘要

This work describes a Beach Morphodynamic Model tool (BeachMM) that integrates state of the art wave/morphological numerical models (SWAN and XBeach) within a standard GIS platform (ArcGIS), aiming to streamlining the process related with the beach morpho-dynamics modelling. The BeachMM tool interface was developed using Python scripting language, taking advantage of its object-oriented and cross platform capabilities as well as its flexibility and strong integration with ArcGIS. In this work, we discuss the merits of this approach through an application example, where the tool was applied to the morphodynamic modelling of an exposed beach located at the Portuguese western coast. This tool has proven its applicability as it greatly simplifies dataflow effort, reduces the human error and provides a dynamic visualization of the modelling results.