About the project
Beaches are of high economic and societal importance. They support tourism and provide essential protection from the marine environment by dissipating energy from tides, surges, and waves. Many beaches are becoming narrower under increasing effects of climate change. The situation is particularly acute for beaches with little or no contemporary sediment supply, resulting in some cases in complete beach loss with dire consequences for coastal protection, local economy, and coastal community resilience.
Despite a broad conceptual consensus on the impacts of the changing climate on beach size, lack of understanding of the variability of beach loss in space and time means that coastal management may rely on erroneous assumptions. For example, tourism and amenity value is often viewed as a transferable benefit (e.g. visitors could go to another beach), which would be incorrect in absence of significant spatial variability in beach loss.
This project will gain new insight into the relationship between beach loss and coastal community resilience by addressing the following questions:
- What is the spatial variability of observed beach loss and its key dynamical drivers?
- How is the variability of beach loss drivers projected to change under the changing climate?
- What are the implications for beach management?
The project will build upon new national scale numerical modelling led by the NOC under the CHAMFER project (https://projects.noc.ac.uk/chamfer/) and satellite observations led by the BGS (e.g. Digital Great Britain coastlines, DiGBcoast v1.0).
You will combine outputs from national scale numerical models with satellite observations to provide the necessary information on beach loss and its dynamical drivers. Output from numerical modelling will include time-slices under future climate scenarios.
Supervisors
As well as Dr Hachen Kassem, you will also receive supervision from Dr Laurent Amoundry (lead supervisor) from the National Oceanographic Centre (NOC), Southampton.
Please contact the lead supervisor if you require further information about the project.
