Sediment Fluxes in Shelf Seas Modelling and Monitoring

This is a review paper, assessing progress reported in a Special Issue (Prandle and Lane, 2000) of Coastal Engineering focusing on simulation of SPM in the North Sea, against issues over a diverse range of shelf seas and their coastal margins. The broad objectives of reproducing the characteristics of sediment fluxes off an open coast and relating these to tidal and wave forcing were achieved. However, accurate computation of these fluxes remains sensitive to largely empirical coefficients used in determining erosion and deposition rates. Bed roughness strongly influences both these coefficients and the associated near-bed current magnitudes (including wave impact thereon). Bed roughness can change significantly over a tidal cycle and dramatically over seasons or in the course of a major event. Accurate simulation of sediment fluxes on a day-to-day basis is constrained by dependency on the initial distribution of mobile sediments. The latter depends on rates and locations of original sources and the time history of preceding events. Remote sensing via aircraft could provide data for assimilation into such models to circumvent these constraints. The approaches described here can be readily applied to other coastal regions to indicate the likely distributions and pathways of known sediment sources. However quantitative simulations will require an associated observational programme. A subsequent stage is to understand the evolving balance between the forecasted sediment movement - the resulting morphological adjustments and thence modifications to the prevailing tidal current and wave regimes.