The California coastal wave monitoring and prediction system

AbstractA decade-long effort to estimate nearshore (20m depth) wave conditions based on offshore buoy observations along the California coast is described. Offshore, deep water directional wave buoys are used to initialize a non-stationary, linear, spectral refraction wave model. Model hindcasts of spectral parameters commonly used in nearshore process studies and engineering design are validated against nearshore buoy observations seaward of the surfzone. The buoy-driven wave model shows significant skill at most validation sites, but prediction errors for individual swell or sea events can be large. Model skill is high in north San Diego County, and low in the Santa Barbara Channel and along the southern Monterey Bay coast. Overall, the buoy-driven model hindcasts have relatively low bias and therefore are best suited for quantifying mean (e.g. monthly or annual) nearshore wave climate conditions rather than extreme or individual wave events. Model error correlation with the incident offshore wave energy, and between neighboring validation sites, may be useful in identifying sources of regional modeling errors

Testing and calibrating parametric wave transformation models on natural beaches

Author Posting. © Elsevier B.V., 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Coastal Engineering 55 (2008): 224-235, doi:10.1016/j.coastaleng.2007.10.002.To provide coastal engineers and scientists with a detailed inter-comparison of widely used parametric wave transformation models, several models are tested and calibrated with extensive observations from 6 field experiments on barred and unbarred beaches. Using previously calibrated (“default”) values of a free parameter γ, all models predict the observations reasonably well (median root-mean-square wave height errors are between 10% and 20%) at all field sites. Model errors can be reduced by roughly 50% by tuning γ for each data record. No tuned or default model provides the best predictions for all data records or at all experiments. Tuned γ differ for the different models and experiments, but in all cases γ increases as the hyperbolic tangent of the deep-water wave height, Ho. Data from 2 experiments are used to estimate empirical, universal curves for γ based on Ho. Using the new parameterization, all models have similar accuracy, and usually show increased skill relative to using default γ.The Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation provided support

Observations of sand bar evolution on a natural beach

Waves, currents, and the location of the seafloor were measured on a barred beach for about 2 months at nine locations along a cross-shore transect extending 255 m from 1 to 4 m water depth. The seafloor location was measured nearly continuously, even in the surf zone during storms, with sonar altimeters mounted on fixed frames. The crest of a sand bar initially located about 60 m from the shoreline moved 130 m offshore (primarily when the offshore significant wave height exceeded about 2 m), with 1.5 m of erosion near the initial location and 1 m of accretion at the final location. An energetics-type sediment transport model driven by locally measured near-bottom currents predicts the observed offshore bar migration, but not the slow onshore migration observed during low-energy wave conditions. The predicted offshore bar migration is driven primarily by cross-shore gradients in predicted suspended sediment transport associated with quasi-steady, near-bottom, offshore flows. These strong (>50 cm/s) currents, intensified near the bar crest by wave breaking, are predicted to cause erosion on the shoreward slope of the bar and deposition on the seaward side. The feedback amoung morphology, waves, circulation, and sediment transport thus forces offshore bar migration during storms

Energy saturation and phase speeds measured on a natural beach

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/JC087iC12p09499Field measurements of wave height and speed from 7-m depth shoreward are described. The experiment plan consisted of a shore-normal transect of closely spaced (compared to a dominant wave length) velocity, pressure, and elevation sensors on an almost plane profile having an inshore slope of 1:50. As the waves shoal and begin to break, the dominant dissipative mechanism is due to turbulence generated at the crest, and wave heights become increasingly depth controlled as they progress across the surf zone. Wave heights in the inner surf zone are strongly depth independent: the envelope of the wave heights is described by H/sub rms/ = 0.42 h. The depth dependence of the breaking wave height is shown to be related to the kinematic instability criterion. Celerity spectra were measured by using phase spectra calculated between pairs of adjacent sensors. Inshore of 4-m depth, the celerity was found distant over the energetic region of the spectrum. A 'mean' celerity was compared with linear theory and was within +20% and -10%, showing good agreement for such a nonlinear, dissipative region

Relating Lagrangian and Eulerian horizontal eddy statistics in the surfzone

The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2013JC009415Concurrent Lagrangian and Eulerian observations of rotational, low-frequency (1024 to 1022 Hz) surfzone eddies are compared. Surface drifters were tracked for a few hours on each of 11 days at two alongshore uniform beaches. A cross-shore array of near-bottom current meters extended from near the shoreline to seaward of the surfzone (typically 100 m wide in these moderate wave conditions). Lagrangian and Eulerian mean alongshore velocities V are similar, with a midsurfzone maximum. Cross-shore dependent Lagrangian (rL) and Eulerian (rE) rotational eddy velocities, estimated from low-pass filtered drifter and current meter velocities, respectively, also generally agree. Cross-shore rotational velocities have a midsurfzone maximum whereas alongshore rotational velocities are distributed more broadly. Daily estimates of the Lagrangian time scale, the time for drifter velocities to decorrelate, vary between 40 and 300 s, with alongshore time scales greater than cross-shore time scales. The ratio of Lagrangian to apparent Eulerian current meter decorrelation times TL/TA varies considerably, between about 0.5 and 3. Consistent with theory, some of the TL/TA variation is ascribable to alongshore advection and TL/TA is proportional to V/r, which ranges between about 0.6 and 2.5. Estimates of TL/TA vary between days with similar V/r suggesting that surfzone Lagrangian particle dynamics vary between days, spanning the range from ‘‘fixed-float’’ to ‘‘frozen-field’’ [Lumpkin et al., 2002], although conclusions are limited by the statistical sampling errors in both TL/TA and V/r.This analysis was supported by NSF, ONR, and CA Sea Grant. The HB06 field work was supported by CA Coastal Conservancy, NOAA, NSF, ONR, and CA Sea Grant. R. T. Guza was a co-PI on the HB06 experiment. Staff and students from the Integrative Oceanography Division (B. Woodward, B. Boyd, K. Smith, D. Darnell, I. Nagy, D. Clark, M. Omand, M. Yates, M. McKenna, M. Rippy, and S. Henderson) and the Naval Postgraduate School (J. Brown and B. Swick) were instrumental in acquiring the field observations. The comments from three reviewers improved this manuscript and are greatly appreciated