Analysis of Beach Nourishment Schemes

Coastal Engineering, 2002

The uses of beach fill in the countries of the European Union are highlighted and discussed with respect to the general situation, project type and objectives, design and evaluation procedures, legal framework, and financial aspects. As expected, significant differences were found among the investigated countries. In general, the study shows that it would be very profitable for south European countries to learn about the Dutch and German practices, particularly regarding the long-term coastal management and the regular monitoring of the coastal morphology. On the other hand, recent Dutch experience has shown that their legal system is a bit rigid, leading sometimes to renourishments that are less necessary to reach the global objective.

Environmental Management and Health, 1995

Coastal sections suffering from erosion generally show the common symptom of a lack of available sand to allow the build up of the natural coastal barrier. Soft methods of coastal protection, including beach nourishment, profile nourishment, feeder berms, compensation‐dredging, aim to tackle the problem at its source, i.e. by supplying sand to the system. When thoroughly designed, these methods are considered the best technical/economical and appropriate solutions.

Journal of environmental management, 2016

Resilient coastal protection requires adaptive management strategies that build with nature to maintain long-term sustainability. With increasing pressures on shorelines from urbanisation, industrial growth, sea-level rise and changing storm climates soft approaches to coastal management are implemented to support natural habitats and maintain healthy coastal ecosystems. The impact of a beach mega-nourishment along a frontage of interactive natural and engineered systems that incorporate soft and hard defences is explored. A coastal evolution model is applied to simulate the impact of different hypothetical mega-nourishment interventions to assess their impacts' over 3 shoreline management planning epochs: present-day (0-20 years), medium-term (20-50 years) and long-term (50-100 years). The impacts of the smaller interventions when appropriately positioned are found to be as effective as larger schemes, thus making them more cost-effective for present-day management. Over time t...

The Proceedings of the Coastal Sediments 2015, 2015

Nourishment projects often experience a period of large initial losses just after completion of the project. A better understanding of these losses would improve the design of nourishment strategies. Here we propose that the large initial losses could partly originate from the change in the cross-shore slope. A steepening of the slope results in an increase in background erosion, as is deduced from common bulk sediment transport formulae. Morphological data from a nourishment at Vlugtenburg Beach, the Netherlands provide support for this hypothesis. At Vlugtenburg we observe a large difference in the erosion rates between the first years. Our measurements also show that the slope adjusts on similar timescales as the timescales of initial losses, i.e. 1 to 2 years. We conclude that the steepness of the man-made profile is an important parameter, which may be manipulated to influence the lifetime of the nourishment.

Coastal Engineering 1996, 1997

In order to improve the effectiveness of artificial nourishments a replenishment outside of the beach itself was taken into consideration for a prototype test. Contradictory to the earlier six conventional beach nourishments the material was deposited both on the shoreface and on the beach. The fate of the combined shoreface and beach nourishment was as well as that of the preceding conventional beach replenishment intensively monitored including field investigations of bathymetry, hydro-and sediment dynamics. On the basis of these data and additional application of mathematical models the effectiveness of this new type of nourishment has been evaluated in comparison with a conventional beach replenishment.

Coastal Engineering, 1984

Journal of Coastal Research

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the behaviour of nourished beaches in Cadiz Bay (SW Spain). Similar nourishment modalities were used in all studied beaches: sand was dredged from the sea floor and split on the beach to create a raised, flat berm. These nourishment modalities transformed the initially dissipative profiles into intermediate-reflective ones. The monitoring program showed an asymptotic stationary beach trend, tending to achieve a "minimum equilibrium volume". In fact, despite the initial, important erosion, beaches acquired a seasonal behaviour with dissipative state associated to erosive conditions and an intermediate one during constructive conditions, general beach stability. Finally, it was observed that a nourishment work carried out during fair weather conditions greatly favours beach stability because sand is relocated and distributed in a natural way under low energy conditions. : ADDITIONAL INDEX WORDS Coastal erosion, volumetric variations, nourishment works, Bay of Cádiz.

Journal of Marine Science and Engineering

The present paper proposes a methodology to optimise the design of a beach protection intervention at Saadiyat Island, of the Abu Dhabi city in the United Arab Emirates. In particular, a nourishment performance index (NPI) has been introduced to select among different design alternatives of a coastal engineering intervention related to the ongoing development of the island. The NPI is based on general factors such as the initial volume of sand necessary for the nourishment, the beach surface loss after the intervention and the closure depth. The proposed index, properly integrated with a numerical simulation of the beach morphodynamics, is shown to be promising in the evaluation of the feasibility for the planned coastal defence interventions. The adoption of different design scenarios has showed that the NPI value depends mainly on the built nourishment shoreline.

2012

Typically a beach is out of equilibrium after a nourishment is installed. To observe how a nourished beach behaves on the timescale of storms a monitoring campaign was set up at Vlugtenburg beach after a nourishment in the spring of 2009. Here we show a sediment budget analysis of the first 2.5 years for a coastal domain spanning 1750 m alongshore from-9 to+ 5 m NAP. To investigate the redistribution of nourished sand different sections of the profile are examined.

The characteristics of the Grain-size Nourishment Model together with some tests and applications are here presented. This model operates in three distinct ways (module A, B and C): one predicts the effects of the nourishment; one manages post-intervention monitoring data; and the other furnishes predictions, calibrated with real data (monitoring), for beach-maintenance refills. All modules run separately but are open to data inter-exchanges. Moreover they work in three-di- mensions using data organized into grid matrices covering the coast that is being studied. Inputs for the model (for each module) are the topo-bathymetric and grain size data collected on the active morphological surface (dry beach and shoreface). The output is a numerical description of the artificial deposit, i.e. the sedimentary body comprises between the pre and post-intervention surface. This description aggregates: in module-A, real (pre-nourishment surface) and predicted (post-nourishment) data; in module-...