Storms play a significant role in beach morphodynamics. Storm-induced beach-profile changes and their longshore variations are investigated in this study. The impacts of four summer tropical storms and two series of winter storms over the last 10 years along the coast of Treasure Island were documented. Tropical storms Alberto in 2006, Fay in 2008, Debby in 2012, Hermine in 2016 and winter storms in winter seasons of 2014 and 2015 are discussed in this study. In general, the Treasure Island beach experienced more erosion generated by tropical storms with greater intensity, but shorter duration, as compared to winter storms due to lower waves, weaker wind and smaller storm surge. Winter storms typically do not generate high storm surge and generally do not cause erosion at the dune and back beach unless the pre-storm beach is very narrow. Based on pre- and post-storm beach-profile surveys along the coast of Treasure Island, the northern end of the barrier island, located directly downdrift of the John’s Pass tidal inlet, experienced erosion along the entire profile during the storms. Along the middle part of Treasure Island, dry beach suffered erosion during both the tropical storms and winter seasons while the nearshore zone suffered erosion during the tropical storms and experienced deposition during the winter seasons. Sunset Beach at the southern end experienced severe erosion during tropical storm Debby, but not during other storms. Winter seasons caused relatively small changes to the morphology of Sunset Beach. Deposition happened in the nearshore zone along Sunset Beach during winter storms. Survey line R143 at the very south end of Treasure Island suffered erosion in tropical storm Alberto, Debby and Hermine. Beach profile changes induced by Tropical storm Fay was different as compared to other tropical storms. Considerably less beach erosion occurred due to the large distance of the storm path from the study area. Overall, Sunshine Beach, bounded by John’s Pass inlet at northern end of Treasure Island, was influenced both by wave conditions and the tidal flows. Sediment transport was to the north along the coast of Sunshine Beach when wind direction was from south, e.g. during tropical storm Fay. However the northward sediment transport was blocked by the John’s Pass jetty. Therefore, deposition occurred at Sunshine Beach during tropical storm Fay. When wind direction was from north (e.g. during tropical storms Alberto and during the winter seasons), southward sediment transport was generated. Erosion occurs during the northerly approaching storms. The morphodynamics of the middle section of Treasure Island are influenced by the sand supply at the attachment point of John’s Pass ebb delta. Sunset Beach experienced various levels of erosion during the tropical storms not only because of the high wave, strong wind and high water level generated by storms, but also due to the higher waves associated with an offshore dredged pit.

Shell Key and Mullet Key are two sandy barrier islands on the West Central Florida coast near the mouth of Tampa Bay. These islands are part of an interconnected barrier-inlet system that includes Pass-a-Grille (PAG) and Bunces Pass. Shell Key is a relatively new island about 40-years of age that formed in between the two inlets of Bunces Pass and PAG. Mullet Key is an island to the south of Shell Key situated between Bunces Pass and the main Tampa Bay channel that has demonstrated large scale upward shoaling events. Using numerical modeling, the wave and tidal conditions at the dual-inlet system were investigated in order to understand the hydrodynamic conditions that drive the morphology change. Historical aerial imagery and historical nautical charts were analyzed to determine the large scale accretionary and erosive changes that happened in the study area from 1873 to 2018. Four historical nautical charts, from 1873, 1928, 1966, and 1996 were digitized to create bathymetry maps of the two islands, their adjacent inlets, and the ebb shoals. These historical bathymetry maps were compared with the bathymetry survey by this study in 2016. The research goal of this thesis is to investigate the mechanism of origin and development of two barrier islands along the coast of West Central Florida through a time series of photos combined with numerical modeling. Based on aerial photos from 1984 to 2018, the overall shape and orientation of ebb shoals at both Bunces Pass and PAG were analyzed in order to examine the effect that the 30 year swash bar cycle at Bunces Pass has on a connected inlet system. The ebb shoal orientations were compared to see how swash bar initiation would affect the two ebb shoals; most notably Bunces Pass ebb shoal. A bending of the entire Bunces Pass ebb shoal was identified over the 2002-2018 time span corresponding to the development of a large sand feature located here. Further numerical modeling was conducted at PAG to determine the factors controlling the formation of Shell Key. Before the 1970s, the PAG inlet included two branches, the North PAG Channel and the South PAG Channel. A major dredging event took place at the North PAG Channel in 1966 causing significant widening and deepening of the channel. This dredging event was simulated to quantify the impact to the natural flow pattern. The 1966 dredging project had a significant impact to the overall flow pattern, increasing the ebb jet flow velocity by 0.8 m/s over the dredged area and significantly decreasing flow velocity by -0.4 m/s over a large area where the South PAG Channel was previously located. This artificially induced change of flow pattern resulted in the closure of South PAG Channel and the corresponding development of Shell Key.

Inlets and channels are dredged often to maintain navigation safety. It is beneficial to reintroduce the dredged material back into the littoral system, in the form of beach or nearshore nourishments. Nourishment in the nearshore is becoming an increasingly utilized method, particularly for dredged material that contains more fine sediment than the native beach. This research examines the morphologic evolution of two different nearshore nourishments. A nearshore berm was constructed at Fort Myers Beach, Florida using mixed-sized sediment dredged from a nearby channel. The nearshore berm was placed in water depths between 1.2 and 2.4 m with the berm crest just below MLLW in the shape of a bar. The nearshore berm migrated onshore while the system was approaching a dynamic equilibrium. Near the end of the fourth year, the beach profiles had returned to the equilibrium shape characteristic of the study area. Gaps in the berm allowed water circulation and should be considered as a design parameter. The fine sediment fractions in the original placed material was selectively transported and deposited offshore, while the coarser component moved onshore. The dry beach maintained the same sediment properties throughout the study period and was not influenced by the fine sediment in the initial construction of the berm. Another nearshore nourishment was placed along eastern Perdido Key, Florida in 2011-2012 using maintenance dredged material from nearby Pensacola Pass. Different from the Fort Myers Beach berm, the material was placed within the swash-zone, with a maximum elevation of +0.91 m NAVD88 (or 0.62 m above MHHW). The low constructed berm elevation allowed natural overwash processes to occur frequently, which resulted in net onshore sediment transport and growth of the active beach berm. Sediment volume gain west of the project area due to longshore spreading of the nourishment occurred mostly in the trough between the shoreline and the bar, rather than on the dry beach. The swash-zone berm evolved back to the natural equilibrium profile shape maintained in the study area within 8 months. The performance of the swash-zone nourishment was compared to two previous beach nourishments at the same location in 1985 and 1989-1991, with higher berm elevations, at +3 m and +1.2 m NAVD88, respectively. The 1.2-km 1985 nourishment performed the poorest with a shoreline retreat rate of 40 m/year. The 7.3-km 1989-1991 nourishment performed the best with a retreat rate of 11 m/year. This suggests that high berm elevations do not necessarily lead to better nourishment performance. Longshore extent of a nourishment may play an essential role. The distant passage of two tropical storms (Tropical Storm Debby and Hurricane Isaac) generated high waves for the study areas. The two berm nourishments responded differently to the storm. Response was also compared to a beach nourishment in Sand Key. The bar-shaped Fort Myers Beach berm was split into two smaller bars, while a storm berm developed for the swash-zone nourishment at Perdido Key. In both cases, the energetic storm conditions accelerated the evolution of the berm profiles toward equilibrium. As compared to the measured nearshore waves by this study, CMS-Wave accurately propagated the WIS Hindcast waves. SBEACH accurately captured the maximum water elevation, consistent with measured upper limit of morphology change. The model correctly predicted beach and nearshore erosion during the storms. The growth of the storm berm at the Perdido Key swash-zone nourishment was predicted reasonably well by the SBEACH model. However, the magnitudes of the storm-induced erosion and the locations of the offshore bar were not accurately predicted consistently.

The heavily developed Long Key is located in Pinellas County in west-central Florida. The structured Blind Pass at the north end of the barrier island interrupts the southward longshore sediment transport, resulting in severe and chronic beach erosion along the northern portion of the island. Frequent beach nourishments were conducted to mitigate the erosion. In this study, the performance of the most recent beach nourishment in 2010 is quantified through time-series beach profile surveys. Over the 34-month period, the nourished northern portion of the island, Upham Beach, lost up to 330 m3/m of sand, with a landward shoreline retreat of up to 100 m. The middle portion of the island gained up to 25 m3/m of sand, benefiting from the sand lost from Upham Beach. The southern portion of Long Key lost a modest amount of sediment, largely due to Tropical Storm Debby, which approached from the south in June 2012. The severe erosion along Upham Beach is induced by a large negative longshore transport gradient. The beach here has no sand bar and retreated landward persistently over the 34-month study period. In contrast the profiles in the central section of the island generally have a sand bar which moved landward and seaward in response to seasonal and storm-induced wave-energy changes. The sand volume across the entire profile in the central portion of the island is mostly conserved. Two typical example beach profiles, LK3A and R157, were selected to examine the ability of the commonly used principal component analysis (PCA), also commonly known as empirical orthogonal function analysis (EOF), to identify beach profile ix changes induced by longshore and cross-shore sediment transport gradients. For the longshore-transport driven changes at the non-barred profile LK3A, the principal eigenvector accounted for over 91% of the total variance, with a dominant broad peak in the cross-shore distribution. At the barred R157, the profile changes were caused mainly by cross-shore transport gradients with modest contribution from longshore transport gradient; eigenvalue one only accounted for less than 51% of the total variance, and eigenvalues two and three still contributed considerably to the overall variance. In order to verify the uniqueness of the PCA results from LK3A and R157, five numerical experiments were conducted, simulating changes at a barred and non-barred beach driven by longshore, cross-shore, and combined sediment transport gradients. Results from LK3A and R157 compare well with simulated beach erosion (or accretion) due to variable longshore sediment transport gradients and due to both cross-shore and longshore sediment transport gradients, respectively. Different PCA results were obtained from different profile change patterns.

Multiple scales of beach morphodynamic processes ranging from those of wave-breaking induced turbulence, individual wave, storm, seasonal, to inter-annual are examined in this dissertation based on both laboratory and field data. These processes were simulated using process-based numerical models and data-driven models. At a microscale, separating turbulence from orbital motion under breaking waves in the surf zone is essential to understanding wave-energy dissipation. Velocity data under monochromatic and random waves in the large-scale sediment transport facility (LSTF) were analyzed. Moving averaging provides a simple method for extracting turbulence from velocity measurements under random breaking waves collected at a reasonably high frequency. Various moving averaging time intervals were examined. An optimum moving averaging interval of approximately 30° to 42° phase angle (relative to peak wave period) allows a reasonable extraction of turbulence. An adaptive moving averaging with variable averaging time at wave crest and trough are proposed to improve the effect of turbulence extraction. At a mesoscale, hydrodynamic conditions associated with onshore migration of a sandbar and the subsequent equilibrium state of a stable bar were examined in the LSTF. Wave and near bottom velocity across the surf zone were measured during the onshore sandbar migration. The near-bottom velocity skewness indicates that before the sandbar reached equilibrium, the velocity was skewed offshore in the nearshore region, and skewed onshore seaward of the bar. The velocity skewness pattern reversed when the beach profile reached equilibrium and the sandbar became stable. The peak onshore directed acceleration was greater than the peak offshore directed acceleration throughout the surf zone during the periods of both onshore migrating and stable sandbar. The macroscale portion of the study examines the beach processes, particularly the morphodynamics of nearshore bar, at storm and seasonal scales. The bar height and bar position were extracted from bimonthly surveyed beach-profiles spaced at 300 m along the 22-km long Sand Key barrier island, West-Central Florida from October 2010 to August 2015. Seasonal beach cycle in the study area is illustrated by onshore sandbar migration during the summer and offshore sandbar migration during the winter, while subaerial beach remains rather stable. Alongshore variations of onshore and offshore sandbar migration were observed over storm events. The water depth over the pre-storm sandbar crest, or the bar crest elevation, is a major factor controlling the onshore or offshore sandbar movement. The offshore moving sandbar tends to have a shallower pre-storm bar crest, while the onshore moving sandbar tends to have a deeper pre-storm bar crest. A dynamic equilibrium bar height of 0.5 m for the study area was identified. The sandbar tends to evolve toward this equilibrium height during the seasonal cycle. The energetic conditions associated with Tropical Storm Debby caused a deviation from the above dynamic equilibrium conditions. The sandbar at most of the profile locations became higher than the pre-storm bar height regardless of the initial height of being greater or less than 0.5 m. After the storm, the higher and shallower bar experienced substantial erosion, the eroded sand was deposited in the trough landward. This resulted in a lower sandbar height, returning to the dynamic equilibrium height of 0.5 m. The Unibest-TC model (Walstra et al., 2012) is able to capture the measured trend of bar migration. The Modelling results suggest that offshore bar migration is dominated by suspended sediment transport. While onshore bar migration is driven mainly by bedload transport. At megascale, a data-driven model was developed to predict beach-profile evolution at multiple-annual scale. Empirical Orthogonal Function analysis was conducted on a time-series beach profile (R61) to identify temporal and spatial trends. Trends in the temporal EOF are modeled using a simple curve fitting. In this case, logarithmic and linear trends were identified. After the trend in temporal EOF values are identified, the curve fitting can be calibrated with 14-month data. The calibrated temporal EOF curve yielded accurate reproduction of profiles. The close examination of multiple scales of beach processes provides a comprehensive understanding of nearshore morphodynamics.

The SUPERTANK dataset is analyzed to examine the upper limit of beach change in response to elevated water level induced by wave runup. Thirty SUPERTANK runs are investigated, including both erosional and accretionary wave conditions under random and monochromatic waves. Two experiments, one under a spilling and one under a plunging breaker-type, from the Large-Scale Sediment Transport Facility (LSTF) are also analyzed. The upper limit of beach change approximately equals the maximum vertical excursion of swash runup. Exceptions to this direct relationship are those with beach or dune scarps when gravity-driven changes, i.e., avalanching, become significant. The vertical extent of wave runup, Rmax, above mean water level on a beach without a scarp is found to approximately equal the significant breaking wave height, Hbs. Therefore, a simple formula Rmax = Hbs is proposed. The linear relationship between maximum runup and breaking wave height is supported by a conceptual derivation. This predictive formula reproduced the measured runup from a large-scale 3-dimensional movable bed physical model. Beach and dune scarps substantially limit the uprush of swash motion, resulting in a much reduced maximum runup. Predictions of wave runup are not improved by including a slope-dependent surf-similarity parameter. The limit of wave runup is substantially less for monochromatic waves than for random waves, attributed to absence of low-frequency motion for monochromatic waves.

Dredging is often conducted to maintain authorized depths in coastal navigation channels. Placement of dredged sediment in the form of nearshore berms is becoming an increasingly popular option for disposal. Compared to direct beach placement, nearshore berms have fewer environmental impacts such as shore birds and turtle nesting, and have more lenient sediment compatibility restrictions. Understanding the potential morphological and sedimentological evolution is crucial to the design of a nearshore berm. Furthermore, the artificial perturbation generated by the berm installation provides a unique opportunity to understand the equilibrium process of coastal morphodynamics. Matanzas Pass and Bowditch Point, located on the northern tip of Estero Island in west-central Florida were dredged in October 2009. The dredged material was placed approximately 600 ft offshore of Fort Myers Beach and 1.5 miles southeast of Matanzas Pass, in the form of an artificial berm. Time-series surveys and sediment sampling were conducted semi-annually in order to quantify sedimentological characteristics and morphological changes within the first year after construction of the berm. The artificial berm at Fort Myers Beach is composed mainly of fine sand. Patches of mud were found throughout the study area, with the highest concentrations being in the trough landward of the berm, and offshore southeast of the berm area. The highest concentration of carbonates was found in the swash zone, as well as at the landward toe of the berm, which coincides with the coarsest sediment. The overall mud content of the berm is lower than that of the dredged sediment, thus indicating a coarsening of the berm over time. The reduction in fines as compared to the original dredged sedimet could also indicate a selective transport mechanism that moves finer material offshore, and coarser material landward, a desirable trend for artificial berm nourishment. During the course of the first year, the berm migrated landward and increased in elevation. Onshore migration occurred mostly within the first 6 months. Along with onshore migration, the shape of the berm changed from a symmetrical bell curve to an asymmetrical shape with a steep landward slope. There is no clear spatial trend of volume change alongshore within the berm area, indicating that sediment transport is mostly cross-shore dominated. A salient was formed landward of the northern portion of the berm. Several gaps were created during berm construction due to dredging and placement techniques. These dynamic gaps are likely maintained by rip currents through them. This study showed that the Fort Myers Beach berm is active, due to its landward migration during the first year after construction.

Beach nourishment provides an excellent opportunity for the study of intensified sediment transport gradients and associated morphological changes in a natural setting. The objectives of this study are to quantify and predict longshore and cross-shore transport gradients induced by 1) beach nourishment, 2) different storm wave conditions, and 3) the annual wave climate and long-term sediment supply. The details of sediment transport rates and gradients induced by gradual processes and high-energy events are analyzed on a macro-scale. Well-planned monitoring of the 2004 Upham Beach nourishment project in west-central Florida collected high-spatial and -temporal resolution field data. Three hurricanes passed by the project soon after nourishment was complete.Post-nourishment planform adjustment occurs immediately after nourishment via diffusion spit development at the end transitions. Thus, the initiation of planform adjustment may be abrupt, rather than gradual as pred icted by the typical diffusion models. Diffusion spit formation is dominant during relatively calm wave conditions on coasts with low wave heights and tidal ranges.Profile equilibration also may be an event-driven, rather than a gradual, process. Rapid profile equilibration following nourishment occurred not only due to hurricane passage, but also during a winter season. The duration between nourishment and the passage of the first high-energy event is an important factor controlling the time scale of profile equilibration.The passage of three hurricanes generated different wave conditions and induced different sediment transport directions, rates, and gradients due to their variable proximities to the project area. The direction of cross-shore transport was governed by wave steepness. Onshore sediment transport occurred during a storm event, in contrast with the concepts of gradual onshore transport during mild wave conditions and abrupt offshore transport during storm events, as cited in the literature.By formulating sediment budgets on various temporal and spatial scales, both event-driven and average transport rates and gradients can be resolved. Annual average transport rates for a region should not be arbitrarily applied to nourished beaches; rather, sediment budgets formulated with high-spatial and -temporal resolution field data should be formulated during the design phase of future nourishment projects.