RELEVANCE OF INUNDATION AND BOULDER TRANSPORT DATA FOR COASTAL ENGINEERS, AND CROSSING THE DISCIPLINARY DIVIDE

Awareness of the impacts of extreme waves on coasts and coastal infrastructure has been growing rapidly. Highest energy events often do most damage, but they are difficult to study because direct observations are almost impossible, and therefore physics involved are inadequately understood. Coastal boulder deposits preserve a static record of wave energies that can help bridge that gap, and recent field research and numerical modeling are beginning to augment understanding of relationships between coastal topography, wave climate, and damage, with relevance for coastal engineering. The data and interpretations, however, occur mostly in the scientific literature, with little uptake from engineers working on practical coastal infrastructure applications. Therefore, implications for coastal systems management have not crossed over into the engineering world where they could be of practical use.

As part of the NSF-funded ISROC (Inundation Signatures on Rocky Coastlines) Research Coordination Network, our collaboration aims to provide guidance to engineers on the movement of coastal rocks as a result of interaction with high energy waves. To this end we have synthesised measurements of boulder transport with numerical modeling of wave amplification, physical wave-tank experiments, and analysis of wave energy return times from meteorological buoy data. By distilling the data to emphasise observations and relationships most relevant to coastal engineering problems, we are generating a synergistic picture of relationships between coastal wave energy, onshore flow, and mass transport for engineers. Assimilating this into a format that can be easily communicated to the engineering community in terms of the understanding and demands of hazards will promote applications of wave inundation and boulder transport research for onshore/offshore built infrastructure, and develop pathways towards guidelines and standardization for practice. The revision and refocusing of guidelines will be refined further based on feedback and guidance from the engineers working on coastal infrastructure. We anticipate that this will generate new synergies among geoscientists and practicing engineers, leading to more efficient transmission of usable geoscience into the public sphere.