We forgave Bagnold everything for the way he wrote about dunes. “The grooves and the corrugated sand resemble the hollow of the roof of a dog’s mouth.” That was the real Bagnold, a man who would put his inquiring hand into the jaws of a dog. – Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Ralph Bagnold, widely considered one of the godfathers of sediment transport, was a soldier in the British army who spent much of the Second World War scouting around in the Libyan desert. In the process, he learned much about the dynamics of sand dunes, and formed the basis for many theories that are still in use today for explaining how sediment is blown around by wind or water.
This week I am proud of our very own up-and-coming Bagnold, Charlotte Uphues, who successfully defended her thesis, Coastal Aeolian Sediment Transport in an Active Bed Surface Layer, on Thursday. Charlotte did a fantastic job of designing and carrying out her own super cool field experiments, using tracer sediment to estimate aeolian (wind-blown) sediment transport on a beach here in Holland. As the dunes of the Netherlands are a key component to Dutch coastal defenses against flooding, it is essential that we understand better how they evolve by improving our abilities to predict aeolian transport.
I would elaborate a bit more about her findings, but Charlotte will be submitting her thesis for publication in a journal soon, so it will remain under wraps for now. Stay tuned, I don’t think we’ve heard the last from Charlotte!
Ebb-tidal deltas are gigantic piles of sand that form at the seaward mouth of tidal inlets. They are constantly on the move, shifting shape and size in response to the waves and tides. Where exactly is that sand going? This is a question I have been struggling with for the past 5 years during my PhD, and we have recently made great strides in part due to the efforts of Paula Lambregts.
Yesterday, Paula Lambregts successfully defended her master’s thesis, “Sediment bypassing at Ameland inlet“. I had the great honour of co-supervising Paula’s research throughout the last ten or so months, and I am enormously proud of her. Her project encompassed a range of approaches, including bathymetric analysis and numerical modelling, to solve the mystery of the sediment pathways.
First, Paula’s detective work led her to examine detailed measurements of the seabed bathymetry at Ameland Inlet in the Netherlands, taken over the past fifteen years. These measurements give snapshots of the underwater delta landscape. By comparing the bathymetry from different months or years, we can track the delta’s evolution. In the image below, we see four snapshots of the ebb-tidal delta before and after the construction of a sand nourishment (i.e., the large pile of sand that appears in panel B). This nourishment was a large-scale pilot test to determine if creating sand deposits like this is a viable strategy for strengthening the coast of nearby islands.
Bathymetric maps showing Ameland Ebb-Tidal Delta before (A) and after (B,C,D) the construction of a massive sand nourishment. Paula’s analysis tracked how this nourishment evolved over time, smoothed and smeared out to the east and south east by the combined effects of waves and tides.
After describing how the delta has evolved in the past, Paula developed hypotheses about the physics underlying this behaviour- how do waves and tides move the sand around to create the patterns we observe? To answer this question, she used a combination of computer models to estimate sand transport pathways. This allows us to “connect the dots” and explain how the sand moved from one place to another. The first component was a D-Flow FM model, which is used to simulate the hydrodynamics (waves and tides) and sediment transport (where and how much sand moves). The second component of her modelling approach was to apply SedTRAILS, a brand-new tool developed by my colleagues and I at Deltares for visualizing predicting sediment transport pathways. Using SedTRAILS, she was able to create some really cool maps that indicate where the sand goes.
Sediment transport pathways on Ameland ebb-tidal delta in 2020, as visualized using SedTRAILS. The small white circles indicate the source locations of sediment, and thin black lines show the sediment pathways originating from those sources. The yellow lines highlight major transport pathways, and the red lines indicate convergent zones where multiple pathways meet. The white dashed lines indicate divergence zones, where the transport pathways veer away from and (on average) do not cross.
Drawing on her prior expertise in geology, Paula combined those two lines of evidence (the measurements of the seabed and the modelled sediment pathways), to come up with a series of fantastic conceptual diagrams. These diagrams distill the mysterious piles of sand and complex spaghetti of the images above into a more easily understandable picture:
Paula’s conceptual model summarizing all of the different processes shaping Ameland ebb-tidal delta in 2020. Check out her thesis to see the complete evolution over the past 15 years!
The work that she did is extremely valuable for coastal management, since it gives more insight into where (and where not!) to construct sand nourishments. It also brings new insights to science about how these complex systems work. Last of all, it is enormously helpful for the research that we are continuing to do at TU Delft and Deltares. In September I will continue on with the work on sediment transport pathways at tidal inlets begun during my PhD, and build on the work that Paula has carried out in her thesis project. I am extremely proud of her and hope that we can continue to collaborate in the future!
Coral reefs and the islands that they protect from flooding are in big trouble. This is arecurringthemeon thisblog, and now it’s time for the latest update. We are currently building towards the development of an early flood warning system for low-lying tropical islands fronted by coral reefs. Our previous work on this topic has focused on finding ways to do this accurately for a wide variety of coral reef shapes and sizes, as well as different wave and sea level conditions. However, it’s not enough to be accurate- to deliver timely early warnings, you also need to be fast.
That’s where the latest research of Vesna Bertoncelj comes in.
Vesna’s research provides us with new approaches for making highly accurate predictions of coastal flooding, at limited computational expense. The numerical models that we use to estimate flooding often take a long time to simulate, since they resolve many complex physical processes at high resolution in space and time. However, by paring down these models to only the most essential components for the task at hand, we can do this much faster. My colleagues at Deltares recently developed the SFINCS model, which has been successfully used to predict flooding in a fraction of the time that our standard models take. But how do we put all these different pieces together?
A schematic overview of Vesna’s research methodology. [Source].
First, Vesna established a baseline for model performance by running a computationally intensive XBeach Non-Hydrostatic model (XB-NH+), and a much faster SFINCS model. These models provide an estimate for runup (R2%), which can be taken as a proxy for coastal flooding. In the second step, she used a lookup table (LUT) of pre-computed XBeach model output and to derive the input for the SFINCS model. The crucial task is doing this quickly and accurately, so she experimented with different interpolation techniques for deriving that input. She then compared her new approach with the standard models to find the fastest and most accurate combination.
Her research gives us a useful methodology that we can implement to speed up our early flood warning system, saving time and hopefully someday saving lives.
Vesna’s quality of work is excellent and she has a fantastic attitude towards research and collaboration. Her curiosity, professionalism, and diligence will undoubtedly serve her well in the years to come. I hope that we will have other opportunities to collaborate in the future. If anybody out there needs a bright young coastal researcher and/or modeller, hire her!
We frequently hear in the news about dying coral reefs, and also about the threats of sea level rise and climate change. But there is a key gap: what if we can hit two birds with one stone, and restore damaged ecosystems while providing vital protection against flooding? Our latest research demonstrates how coastal managers and ecologists can join forces to achieve both goals, which may help stretch limited funding further.
I am extremely proud to share Floortje Roelvink’s first scientific paper, “Coral reef restorations can be optimized to reduce coastal flooding hazards“, published in Frontiers of Marine Science. I had the great privilege of sitting on her MSc thesis committee two years ago, and she has been our colleague at Deltares ever since.
At TU Delft, a requirement for our PhD defense is to make ten propositions based on what we have learned during the previous years. Claims posed by my friends and colleagues deal with the nitty gritty details (“All diffusive processes can be derived from an advective one, and failing to do so yields incorrect modelling“[1]) but also the bigger picture of how we do what we do (“The way morphological models are presented and interpreted has a lot in common with predictions of snow depth in five years on December 26th at 4pm. The knowledge in these models deserves a better presentation“[2]).
The propositions must be both defendable and opposable, so as to stimulate an interesting debate during the defense. Some of the propositions should reflect the findings of our research, but it is also traditional to include statements that have nothing to do with it. One colleague[3] even suggested (tongue in cheek) that the increase in the height of Dutch men over time could be explained by sea level rise. I couldn’t resist analyzing the data myself, and the results were surprisingly good:
Spurious correlation of the week! As John von Neumann said, “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
These propositions are a chance to inject a bit of last-minute philosophizing into our Doctorates of Philosophy, and range from the wise (“No wind is favourable if a person does not know to what port (s)he is steering – Seneca“[4]) to the downright cheeky (“This proposition is not opposable“[1]).
What I Learned by Counting Sand for 5 Years
As the clock is ticking on my own PhD (259 days, 13 hours, 39 minutes, and 51 seconds, but who’s counting? *eye twitches*), I started preparing some propositions of my own (obviously in a fit of procrastination on my dissertation). After nearly five years of scrutinizing sand and contemplating connectivity, my research has led me to an inescapable conclusion:
Ebb-tidal deltas are badass morphological features (BAMFs), (c.f. Phillips [2015]).
What, pray tell, is an ebb-tidal delta, and why is it so badass? Ebb-tidal deltas are large underwater piles of sand at the mouth of estuaries and tidal inlets, deposited by outflowing tides and reshaped by waves. I spend my days studying how waves and tides move sand around on the Ameland ebb-tidal delta in the northern part of the Netherlands (see below). We need to know this in order to plan ecologically-sustainable flood protection measures for the Dutch coast. A morphological feature is just a fancy name for some part of a landscape, like a hill or a valley or a beach.
An ebb-tidal delta is the giant pile of sand located at the mouth of a tidal inlet like this one. This may not sound glamorous, but understanding the way it moves around is extremely important for ensuring safe navigation and for predicting erosion and flooding of adjacent coasts.
What makes a badass “badass”?
Phillips[5] defines the archetypal badass as “individualistic, non-conformist, and able to produce disproportionate results”, and applies this concept to geomorphology (the study of how landscapes evolve, at the crossroads of geology and physical geography). Ebb-tidal deltas meet these three criteria, which makes them badass morphological features (BAMFs):
Ebb-tidal deltas are each unique (in shape, location, composition, and in terms of the environmental forces shaping them (like waves and tides)), and hence individualistic.
Ebb-tidal deltas are chaotic systems which defy accurate prediction using physics-based numerical models[6], and hence are non-conformist or “naughty”[7]. This numerical naughtiness is a serious problem for coastal engineers and scientists, since a failure to accurately predict ebb-tidal delta evolution can threaten public safety and lead to costly property or infrastructure damage. They do not “play by the rules” of our existing physics-based deterministic models.
Ebb-tidal deltas are highly nonlinear systems which can greatly amplify small instabilities[8], and hence produce disproportionate results.
In addition to the strict definitions of Phillips[5], ebb-tidal deltas are also “belligerent or intimidating, ruthless, and tough”, other traits reflective of badassery [Oxford Engish Dictionary]. The Columbia River ebb-tidal delta alone is responsible for dozens shipwrecks in the past century, and Ameland ebb-tidal delta has also featured numerous wrecks throughout its history.
Quoting Thomas Pynchon[9], Phillips also notes that badasses are “able to work mischief on a large scale”. Ameland ebb-tidal delta covers an area of approximately 100 square kilometers, roughly the size of The Hague. Many ebb-tidal deltas around the world are even larger!
Seriously?
Now admittedly, ebb-tidal deltas are just big piles of sand. A big pile of sand is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “badass”, unless you are Ralph Bagnold or a Sarlacc. This could probably also be considered gratuitous personification or anthropomorphization.
I’m sure that many of my friends and family have been scratching their heads as to why I would sacrifice the latter half of my 20s to understand them better. A critical reader might ask, “is it possible that you have only convinced yourself that ebb-tidal deltas are cool out of self-preservation?” And the answer is yes. Yes, I have. Nonetheless, I remain steadfast in my assertion that ebb-tidal deltas exhibit major symptoms of geomorphological badassery.
Although the concept of geomorphological badassery may seem silly at first, it illuminates several important truths of our (mis)understanding of these complex bathymetric features. Ebb-tidal deltas are important to study for reasons of coastal flood protection, navigational safety, and ecological value, but we are bad at predicting how they will evolve. This is because each ebb-tidal delta is unique, making it challenging to generalize their behavior. Furthermore, their chaotic, non-conformist behavior renders many of our usual deterministic prediction techniques ineffective. Lastly, the amplifying effect of highly nonlinear physical processes means that small physical changes (e.g., the development of a tiny shoal) could have disproportionately large consequences (e.g., relocation of a channel several kilometers wide). As such, badassery provides a useful conceptual framework for describing the challenges presented by ebb-tidal deltas to coastal engineers and scientists.
In an era of rising sea levels, ambitious plans for coastal protection works are emerging around the world. One such plan is the Delta21 project, proposed by group of Dutch coastal engineers and entrepreneurs. Their goal is to improve flood protection at the mouth of the Haringvliet estuary and develop a tidal power facility, all in one integrated project.
However, the law of unintended consequences often looms large in these sorts of massive infrastructure projects, particularly for environments as complex as estuaries. After a massive flood in 1953, the Dutch constructed the Delta Works, damming most of the estuaries in the southern half of the Netherlands. Prior to that, the Afsluitdijk was constructed across the Zuiderzee in the northern part of the country. These protection works have had dramatic consequences on the physical and ecological development of the Dutch coast, and manyofmycolleagues here have devoted their careers to analyzing the impact of these interventions.
But instead of just looking back and dissecting the successes and failures of 50 or 100 years past, what if we could also use our latest diagnostic tools for predicting the potential impact of bold future interventions? If the Delta21 plan goes ahead, how will the mouth and ebb-tidal delta of the Haringvliet estuary and surrounding coastline evolve? Will existing habitats (particularly in vital intertidal areas) be preserved, disappear, or even expand?
Today, Mayra Zaldivar Piña tackled these questions head on, and successfully defended her master’s thesis, “Stability of intertidal and subtidal areas after Delta21 plan“. I had the pleasure of co-supervising Mayra’s work throughout the last eight or so months, and am very proud of her. She embarked on a challenging modelling project and showed an exemplary critical scientific attitude. I was also so impressed with the persistence and tenacity she showed in doing nearly her entire project during the pandemic. Writing your thesis is a difficult and isolating experience at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Nonetheless, she kept at it and delivered an impressive thesis in the end!
Congratulations Mayra, and best of luck in the next steps of your career!
Three years ago, I experienced one of the highlights of my professional career so far. Alongside researchers from 3 universities, the Dutch government, and several other institutions, we carried out a 40-day field measurement campaign at Ameland Inlet in the north of the Netherlands. We deployed several frames loaded up like Christmas trees with every instrument imaginable: ADVs and ADCPs to measure waves and currents, LISSTs and OBSs to measure suspended sediment, a YSI multiprobe to measure salinity and other water quality indicators, and even a 3D sonar to track the migration of ripples along the seabed.
One of the five measurement frames that we deployed in Ameland back in Fall 2017. It was stacked full of instruments to measure the waves, currents, suspended sand and mud, salinity, ripples, and more.
Four of our five frames survived the relentless ebb and flow of the tide, and even two major storms (one of which left me stranded in Germany after the wind blew down all the overhead train power lines between Berlin and Amsterdam!). In the end, we obtained enough data to keep me busy for probably 3 PhDs, if not the rest of my career. This is just as well, since that last frame was buried in the storm, and based on our understanding of the local dynamics, it will likely re-emerge in another few decades, just in time for my retirement! I look forward to sharing my other findings with you here in the next few months!
Although it used to be the norm for scientists to squirrel away their data, there is an increasing movement towards open accessibility of research data. This improves transparency and accountability in the scientific process, and opens up new opportunities for collaboration. The data we collected is now available in its entirety here on the 4TU web portal or on Rijkswaterstaat’s interactive web viewer.
However, there is a lot of data – I mean A LOT! To help researchers interpret the contents of this database, we prepared an overview paper, which was finally published in the journal of Earth System Science Data! It is also accompanied by a more detailed report, which gets into the nitty-gritty details we didn’t have room to describe in the paper. Nobody likes to read a phonebook-sized report, but it’s nice to have the information there for the few brave souls who do want to comb through our dataset.
Sailing across the Vlie ebb-tidal delta on our way to retrieve the measurement frames at the end of the field campaign.
It was all a huge team effort, as evidenced by the 20+ co-authors. My contribution to this paper focused on the processing of the LISST and YSI multiprobe data, which tell us about the size of particles floating through the water, and how salty that water is. I also designed the maps. As a kid, I loved to read and draw maps, and I think that 7-year-old Stuart would have been tickled to know that he would still be dabbling in cartography all these years later.
As the research in the rest of my PhD (and beyond!) will continue to focus on the fruits of this measurement campaign, I am very keen to work together and collaborate with other researchers who have an interest in this dataset. Please get in touch if you are interested!
Small island developing states around the world are especially vulnerable to the hazards posed by sea level rise and climate change. As engineers, we have a number of tools in our toolbox for reducing the risk posed by coastal flooding and for planning adaptation measures. We often rely on predictive models which combine information about expected wave and sea level conditions, the topography of the coast, and vulnerable buildings and population to estimate potential flooding and expected damage.
However, to use these types of models, we first need to answer a lot of questions: what exactly are the expected wave and sea level conditions? What if detailed topographic measurements are unavailable? What if the population of a given coastal area increases? How are the local buildings constructed, and what are the consequences of that for estimating damage from flooding?
If our information is imperfect (which it almost always is), all is not lost: we can still make educated guesses or test the sensitivity of our models to a range of values. However, these uncertainties can multiply out of control rather quickly, so we need to be able to quantify them. There is no sense in spending the time to develop a detailed hydrodynamic model if your bathymetry data is crap. Can we get a better handle on which variables are the most important to quantify properly? Can we prioritize which data is the most important to collect? This would help us make better predictions, and to make better use of scarce resources (data collection is expensive, especially on remote islands!).
Based on a study of the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the coast of Africa, Matteo found that topographic measurements and the relationship between flood depth and damage to buildings were the biggest uncertainties for predicting present-day flood damage. This means that measuring topography of vulnerable coastal areas in high resolution, and performing better post-disaster damage surveys will provide the best “bang for your buck” right now. However, for longer time horizons (i.e. the year 2100), uncertainty in sea level rise estimates become most important.
Matteo’s work will help coastal managers on vulnerable islands to better prioritize limited financial resources, and will improve the trustworthiness of our predictive models. Great job, Matteo!
Coral reefs around the world are dying; that much is clear from the headlines we see in the news that grow increasingly distressed with each passing year. This is an ecological catastrophe, but are we also losing another key benefit of reefs? Coral reefs provide a form of natural protection against wave-driven flooding on tropical coastlines. This is partly because the physical form of the reef (often a big rocky shelf) serves as a sort of natural breakwater, but is also due to the frictional effects of the corals themselves.
Many species of coral have complex shapes that disrupt the flow of water across reefs, generating turbulence and dissipating energy. This has the effect of reducing the height of waves as they travel across the reef towards the shore. However, these effects are incredibly complex and poorly understood, so we usually just simplify them in our predictive models by considering a reef to be more “hydraulically rough” than a sandy beach, for example. But we need to do better: these models are used to forecast flooding and estimate the impact of future climate change on vulnerable coasts.
How can we improve this? In coastal engineering, we often conduct experiments in the laboratory to test our theories and understand the chaos of natural systems in more controlled settings. What if we could make a scale model of a coral reef and measure exactly how waves are dissipated?
I am extremely proud to announce the graduation of Paul van Wiechen, one of the Master’s students whom I have had the pleasure of supervising. Yesterday, he defended his thesis, “Wave dissipation on a complex coral reef: An experimental study“, where he built a tiny coral reef in the TU Delft wave flume (a 30-m long bathtub with a wave-making paddle at one end) using hundreds of 3D-printed coral models.
It was one of the coolest projects I have ever seen, and his research provides us with valuable measurements that give us a deeper understanding of the vital role that corals play in protecting our coasts.
He also did all of this in the middle of a global pandemic, and somehow managed to stay completely on schedule. We are very lucky, because Paul will be joining the Coastal Engineering department here at TU Delft to start a PhD on dune erosion this fall. We are all glad to have him on the team and eager to see what his research unveils next!
Many of the world’s idyllic tropical coasts are facing threats on multiple fronts. Rising seas threaten the very habitability of many low-lying islands, and the coral reefs that often defend these coasts from wave attack are dying, too. Compounding this problem is the sheer number and variety of these islands: there are thousands of islands, and the coral reefs surrounding them come in all shapes and sizes. Located around the globe, these islands are each exposed to a unique wave climate and range of sea level conditions. This variability in reef characteristics and hydrodynamic forcing makes it a big challenge to forecast how waves will respond when they approach the shore, something that is quite tricky even at the best of times. Under these circumstances, how can we protect vulnerable coastal communities on coral reef coasts from wave-driven flooding?
This is the problem that our fantastic former student, Fred Scott (now at Baird & Associates in Canada), tackled in his paper, Hydro-Morphological Characterization of Coral Reefs for Wave Runup Prediction, recently published in Frontiers in Marine Science. Working in partnership with Deltares and the US Geological Survey for his master’s thesis, Fred came up with a new methodology for forecasting how waves transform in response to variations in the shape and size of coral reefs.
(A) This is a typical fringing coral reef cross-section, showing waves approaching from the right, with the shore on the left. (B) Fred came up with a number of algorithms for classifying and organizing the massive dataset of coral reef cross-sections. (C) The measurements used in our study are from sites around the globe. (D) This is what 30,000 reef cross-sections look like when you try to plot them all on top of one another- clearly we need to whittle those down a bit… [Source: Scott et al, 2020]In our previous research on this topic, we tried to predict flooding on coral reef-lined coasts using a very simplified coral reef shape. This was fine as a first guess, but most reefs are bumpy and jagged and bear little resemblance to the unnaturally straight lines in my model. We couldn’t help it though: there just wasn’t enough data available when I started my thesis four years ago, so we did the best we could with the information we had at the time. On the bright side, using a single simple reef shape meant that we could easily run our computer simulations hundreds of thousands of times to represent a wide range of wave and relative sea level conditions.
Fast forward three years to when Fred began his own thesis. We now had access to a mind-boggling dataset of over 30,000 measured coral reef cross-sections from locations around the world! However, instead of too little data, we now had too much! If we wanted to simulate a whole range of wave and sea level conditions on each of the reefs in our dataset, it might take months or even years to run our models! Fred had the daunting task of distilling that gargantuan database down to a more manageable number of reef cross-sections.
But how do we choose which cross-sections are the most useful or important to look at? Even though every coral reef is, like a beautiful snowflake, utterly unique, surely there must be some general trends or similarities that we can identify, right? This question lies at the heart of Fred’s research, and to answer it, he turned to many of the same powerful statistical and machine-learning techniques used by the likes of Google and Facebook to harvest your life’s secrets from the internet or power self-driving cars. Maybe we can use some of this technology for good, after all!
The main approach that Fred used in this study was cluster analysis, a family of techniques that look for similarities or differences between entries in a dataset, and then group the entries accordingly into clusters. The entries within one cluster should be more similar to each other than to the entries in other clusters. In our case, this meant grouping the reefs into clusters by similar shape and size. This allowed us to increase efficiency and reduce redundancy by proceeding with 500 representative cross sections, instead of the entire database of 30,000.
These days when I’m lonely, I Zoom with 500 of my favourite coral reef profiles…
Other studies in our field have tried similar approaches (such as this Brazilian study of coral reef shape), but the innovative part of Fred’s technique was to also account for similarities in the hydrodynamic response of the waves to each reef via a second round of clustering. Wave transformation on coral reefs can be immensely complicated, so it is entirely possible that two reef profiles could look very different, but lead to the same amount of flooding in the end. Since we are mainly concerned about the flooding (rather than a classification for ecological or geological purposes about coral reef formation and evolution), this suits us just fine!
In the end, Fred was able to distill this colossal dataset into between 50-312 representative cross sections that can forecast wave runup with a mean error of only about 10%, compared to predictions made using the actual cross sections. This opens the door wide for a range of future applications, such as climate change impact assessments or coral reef restoration projects. Right now, we are working on a new project that will apply Fred’s approach to the development of a simplified global early-warning system for wave-induced flooding on coral reef-fronted coasts.
Great work, Fred, and congratulations on your first publication! I am excited to see where this road takes us!
Sources:
Scott, F., Antolinez, J.A.A., McCall, R.C., Storlazzi, C.D., Reniers, A.J.H.M., & Pearson, S.G. (2020). Hydro-morphological characterization of coral reefs for wave-runup prediction. Frontiers in Marine Science. [Link]
Scott, F. (2019). Data reduction techniques of coral reef morphology and hydrodynamics for use in wave runup prediction. [Link]. TU Delft MSc thesis in cooperation with Deltares and the US Geological Survey.
Scott, F., Antolinez, J.A., McCall, R.T., Storlazzi, C.D., Reniers, A., and Pearson, S., 2020, Coral reef profiles for wave-runup prediction: U.S. Geological Survey data release [Link].
Coastally Curious 