Use of Historic Shorelines to Re-Create Synthetic Topography for Risk Analysis

In an earlier post (Feb 26, 2019) I highlighted some work using statisitics from lidar data sets along with SLR to define the risk of shoreline locations and to use that to define how to vary renourishment volumes to maintain a chosen equilibrium beach width. It was based on the presence of a stable beach with a history of random re-nourishments. The variablity was driven mainly by the sampling date (date of lidar data) such that the beach could be ‘larger’ in 2003 than in 1999 and larger in 1999 than in 2001. Trends were included but not as a primary variable.

Now working on Sullivan’s Island beach that has very distinct trends and no history of any significant renourishment I decided to try another way to capture the trend aspect as the primary variable. The white paper highlights a way of taking historic shorelines to the next level of analysis.

Synthetic 1968 Shoreline Morphology