NEMO · Nearshore Monitoring and Modelling:Inter-scale Coastal Behaviour

The unprecedented growth of coastal communities has led to € billions worth of developments and infrastructure within the coastal zone. Therefore, future coastal hazards, which are likely to be exacerbated by climate change, will result in massive socio-economic and environmental impacts. To develop informed coastal management strategies to mitigate such adverse impacts, robust large scale, long term forecasts of coastal change are urgently required. However, none of the currently adopted approaches for simulating large scale, long-term (LSLT) coastal change appear to be capable of producing robust forecasts.The consideration of processes governing LSLT coastal morphodynamics at their operational scales presents similar challenges to those encountered in climate forecasting. The recognition of inter-scale process relationships and the scale aggregation challenge is conceptualised in a scale cascade concept.State-of-the-art and new innovative field monitoring methods will be implemented over a 5 year period along a 20km stretch of the Holland coast to acquire unprecedented process information at different temporal and spatial scales. These data will then be used in conjunction with existing macro-scale field data and strategic process based numerical modelling to support the development of an original, generic, physics based scale-aggregated numerical model of LSLT coastal change.Such an innovative physics based scale-aggregated approach to forecast LSLT coastal change has never been attempted, primarily due to lack of a clear vision and the non-availability of multi-scale field data. The development of the capability to robustly forecast LSLT coastal change will represent a ‘world first’ achievement which will significantly advance the state-of-the-art of coastal engineering/science. I firmly believe that this will place the young and exciting field of coastal engineering/science on par with the more developed disciplines such as meteorology and hydrology.""