Climate change impact on the deltas of Ebro, Po and Rhone: Conceptual models for coastal fringes’ response

Climate change impact on the deltas of Ebro, Po and Rhone: Conceptual models for coastal fringes’ response

Capobianco, M.
Stive, M.J.F.

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Hydraulic Engineering

1996-01-01

All the Mediterranean Dehas are submitted to a physical regression of their coastal fringes and dominated by the wave action because of the decreased water and sediment discharges, if compared to previous stages of their histories. The decrease of the discharges is a consequence of water and solid retention and deviation in the continental watershed and of the relative sea level rise, caused (mainly) by the land subsidence in the deltas and (to an extent that is difficuh to quantify with the present knowledge) by the eustatic sea level rise enhanced by the global climatic change. This paper aims to summarize the work undertaken in the MEDDELT Project regarding the characterisation of the dynamical morphological processes of the coastal fringes of the deltas of Ebro, Po and Rhone and in particular highlight the conceptual developments achieved regarding their integrated modelling. We define the coastal fringes to be those regions of the deltaic areas where there is typically a direct influence of sea dynamics on the evolution of the morphological characteristics on a time scale of decades. In practice, in both the deltas of Po and Rhone such areas may be delimited by sea dikes. This assumption rises the requirement to consider not just the direct natural mechanisms of influence but also the direct human induced ones, particularly in the long term evolution of these fringes. We start by discussing the relation between sea-level rise and coastal erosion and the "pros and cons" of applying the classical Bruun approach. We briefly describe the problem of definition of scales, the computation of budget and the physiographic unh approach with reference to climatic change related phenomena impacting on the fringes. We then focus on the modelling of the formation and reduction processes and the application of the physiographic unit approach. We conclude by introducing the topic of application of the models in an integrated framework as decision support tools.

delta
climate change

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d677bb4a-87de-41f6-9778-aade5b99638e

Meddelt

Proceedings MEDDELT Final Workshop, Venezia, Italy

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 1996 Authors