Drs. Orencio Duran Vinent and Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe are investigating the resilience of barrier islands and coastal dunes after high-water events and storms. In doing so, they are helping engineers and researchers assess the vulnerability of coastal landscapes.
Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Generally speaking, there are two types of coastal high-water events: natural disasters — which devastate the shoreline — and lesser storm surges — which do not cause large-scale damage but still affect the coastal environment. It is these latter, routine events that control the post-storm resiliency of dunes and barrier islands.
The team studied the structure and properties of such events worldwide, utilizing buoy and other data to calculate characteristics such as beach elevation, wave runup and water level.
Their findings were twofold: first, they confirmed that high-water events happen randomly and unrelatedly to one another. Second, they discovered that these high-water events shared similar characteristics and had the same typical frequency per year with a given intensity when measured at beach level.
“Regardless of location, we have a unified description,” Duran Vinent said. “This simplifies the work for policymakers or managers because they don’t need complex calculations.”
The team developed a model based on their findings that determines the elevation of a barrier island and whether or not a dune will succeed. This provides a valuable tool in rebuilding coastlines that have been broken down and deteriorated over time, giving engineers a way to see how tall a dune or barrier island needs to be to prevent frequent overwashes and ensure ecosystem survival.
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