LONGSHORE SAND TRANSPORT — AN EXAMINATION OF METHODS AND ASSOCIATED UNCERTAINTIES

摘要

Coastal and port waterfront infrastructure developments on littoral shores require a careful planning of sediment management and formulation of strategies to minimize unwanted morphological changes such structures cause. One of the key necessities in many instances is to quantify longshore sand transport - a phenomenon that occurs along many littoral shores due primarily to obliquely breaking waves. Among many methods, the CERC and Kamphuis methods are widely applied to quantify such transport. Like any other empirical method, while both have distinct differences resulting from assumptions and simplifications of physics, the uncertainty of each method also results from propagation of variable errors into the method. It is shown that for the two methods the propagated uncertainties are in the same order of magnitude, although the Kamphuis method affords a somewhat lower uncertainty than the CERC method. Depending on parameter values, the uncertainty of the methods could be as high as ± 100%.