Impact of relative sea level rise on the Amelander inlet morphology

Impact of relative sea level rise on the Amelander inlet morphology

De Fockert, A.

Stive, M.J.F. (mentor)
Wang, Z.B. (mentor)
Luijendijk, A.P. (mentor)
de Ronde, J.G. (mentor)
de Boer, G.J. (mentor)

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

2008-04-08

The aim of the Strength and Loading of Coastal Structures (SBW) project is to improve the models to derive the Hydraulic Boundary Conditions which are determined along the Dutch coast once per five years. The Amelander inlet is chosen as area of interest in the Wadden Sea. As the Amelander Inlet is morphologically a very active area, this study focuses on the morphological development of the area. The objective of this study is to see what the influence of sea level rise is on the morphological development of the Amelander Inlet. To achieve this, the available data is analysed over the period 1989-2005, after which a morphological model is set-up. The sand balance is analysed to get insight in the current development of the Amelander Inlet system. The model that is used in this study is the process-based model Delft3D, in which the parallel-online approach (Roelvink, 2005) is chosen to simulate the long term morphological development. The model has a hydrodynamic part, which is calibrated on the base of tidal water levels and some discharge measurements. The morphological model uses a morphological tide and a schematised wave climate (consisting of 12 wave scenarios) as boundary conditions. The hindcast that is carried out over the period 1989-1999 shows a valid behaviour regarding the morphological behaviour until 1993, after which the model enlarges the erroneous behaviour regarding the morphological development. The validation is done over the period 1999-2002, wherein is shown that the model is able to predict the morphological behaviour for time spans shorter than five years, while longer time spans show increasing deviations. Finally an experiment is done with relative sea level rise. The intention of this experiment is to see what the relative morphological development of the system will be. From this simulation it became clear that the model is able to predict the hypothesis of the effects due to relative sea level rise. Besides this, the model tends to show a self-restoring capacity regarding the sand balance of the system. In total can be concluded that this experiment to model relative sea level rise with a process based model has potential for future research.

Amelander inlet
sea level rise
morphology
delft3d model
sand balance

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:5fd29cd3-8673-4319-89b1-a758703a8d36

TU Delft, Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Hydraulic Engineering

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2008 A. de Fockert