An investigation of the link between beach morphology and wave climate at Duck, NC, USA

Beaches can play an important role in flood defence by providing protection from the wave action. Understanding how beaches respond during storms and how beach profiles interact with waves and tides is very important in terms of the management of flood and erosion risks. In this paper we describe the application of canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to an historical data set of seabed elevations in Duck, NC, USA. The study site is a sandy beach located on the east coast of USA. The data set comprises detailed bathymetric surveys of beach profiles covering a period of over 24 years, and wave conditions measured over the same period, but at a different sampling rate. The structure of the data set and the data handling methods are described. The CCA method is applied using different assumptions about the distribution of wave heights. The results extend previous work by Larson et al. (2000), and demonstrate that the choice of how to describe the wave conditions can influence the quality of predictions made on the basis of the CCA results.