Research

Shingle beaches often act as primary soft defences against coastal flooding. Unhealthy beaches can reduce protection, prompting designers to increase beach volume to improve overtopping performance. However, no tools currently exist to assess wave overtopping on seawalls fronted by dynamic shingle beaches, creating design uncertainty. To address this, the University of Plymouth and JBA Consulting are conducting a PhD project combining physical and numerical studies to develop overtopping and force formulations for design applications.

Accurate shoreline‑change prediction is essential for coastal management under climate variability. This study assesses deep learning methods, using LSTM and CNN‑LSTM models with direct input and autoregressive approaches. All models captured temporal change, with autoregressive methods performing best. Noise reduction through seasonal decomposition and filtering improved accuracy, especially with 52‑week data. Lower‑resolution datasets reduced performance, requiring at least fortnightly data. Ensemble modelling produced effective quasi‑probabilistic forecasts, highlighting the value of AR architectures and high‑quality data.

Understanding the resilience of coastal systems in a changing climate is key to support the transition from traditional management towards more sustainable planning. This work describes a pilot methodology developed and applied to quantify a Coastal Resilience Index (CRI) for a 2 km sand dune system at Nairn in North-East Scotland.

This paper summarises the findings of using two distinct methodologies to represent mangrove structures in a numerical wave tank (NWT) within the framework of a CFD model. The work is the first phase of a larger project that aims to improve the parametrisation of mangroves in reduced-dimension, 2D-Horizontal (2DH), coastal area models; specifically, long wave models. The primary goal is to determine approaches to best parameterise the effects of both added mass (inertia) and drag forces, based on the properties of individual mangroves and the hydrodynamic conditions (i.e. water depths and velocities).

This research provides an understanding of the response of gravel barrier beaches to unimodal and bimodal storms through morphodynamic modelling.

Understanding the prevalence of storm clustering at inter- (between) and intra (within)-annual timescales around the UK coastline. Analysis was undertaken and compared using modelled hindcasts and recorded observations of wave conditions and sea levels.