Assessment of Shoreline Change from SAR Satellite Imagery in Three Tidally Controlled Coastal Environments

Coasts are continually changing and remote sensing from satellites has the potential to both map and monitor coastal change at multiple scales. Unlike optical technology, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is uninfluenced by darkness, clouds, and rain, potentially offering a higher revision period to map shoreline position and change, but this can only be feasible if we have a better interpretation of what shorelines as extracted from SAR imagery represent on the ground. This study aims to assess the application of shorelines extracted from SAR from publicly available satellite imagery to map and capture intra-annual to inter-annual shoreline variability. This is assessed in three tidally controlled coastal study areas that represent sand and gravel beaches with different backshore environments: low-lying dunes and marsh; steep, rocky cliff; and urban environments. We have found that SAR shorelines consistently corresponded to positions above the high-water mark across all three sites. We further discuss the influence of the scene geometry, meteorological and oceanographic conditions, and backshore environment and provide a conceptual interpretation of SAR-derived shorelines. In a low-lying coastal setting, the annual change rate derived through SAR presents a high degree of alignment with the known reference values. The present study contributes to our understanding of the poorly known aspect of using shorelines derived from publicly available SAR satellite missions. It outlines a quantitative approach to automatically assess their quality with a new automatic detection method that is transferable to shoreline evolution assessments worldwide

Frederick Rolfe’s Christmas cards: popular culture and the construction of queerness in late Victorian Britain

This article explores how the British writer and artist Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913) made use of images derived from popular visual culture to construct and express a queer identity that attempted to combine cultural, religious and sexual deviance. He made particular use of practices of bricolage of images and artefacts, as can be seen from both his photographs and novels. The Christmas cards that he posted into a scrapbook in the early 1880s can be analysed as evidencing his development of a particular form of queer aesthetic self-expression. This article argues that satires – one of these cards was a satire on clerical effeminacy – have increasingly been seen in a positive light as being implicated in the very practices of deviance that they appear to denounce. However, in relation to aestheticism such arguments may have been taken too far, because of the inherently anti-aesthetic drive of visual satire towards the grotesque. It is suggested that it was only in Rolfe’s final years, when he emerged from the quasi-ecclesiastical closet and developed an intense sex life in Venice, that he found a new confidence to depict himself in ways that were less reliant on stereotypes derived from popular culture and which relied on appropriation of the signs of manly normativity rather than on the suggestive juxtaposition of attributes of deviance