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SWASH: A New Method for Quantifying Coastal Change Completed

By Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center January 16, 2016
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This project is complete and the website is archived and no longer updated.

Coastal erosion is a serious national problem with long-term economic and social consequences. Developed areas are threatened with billions of dollars in property damage as a result of storm impacts and long-term erosion. Over the last few decades, data on the position of the shoreline has emerged as the principal source of information for local, state, and federal government agencies charged with managing coastal erosion. This measure of the shifting land/water interface is also an important source of information for scientific investigations of coastal change, for determinations of the sediment budget, and for conducting numerical simulations of shoreline change.

Despite the importance of this measure of coastal change, the methods available for collecting shoreline position data are very limited. The most commonly applied method-shoreline interpretation from aerial photography-is expensive, labor-intensive, and involves a considerable amount of subjectivity in identifying the shoreline. There is a significant need for a method that can provide an unambiguous and repeatable measure of shoreline position, can cover large sections of coast within a single low tide period, is inexpensive to operate, and can be used for both long-term monitoring and rapid-response surveys of storm impacts. In response to this need, the USGS developed SWASH, a vehicle-based system for measuring shoreline position which utilizes recent advances in the Global Positioning System (GPS). SWASH stands for "Surveying Wide-Area Shorelines."

  • Overview

    This project is complete and the website is archived and no longer updated.

    Coastal erosion is a serious national problem with long-term economic and social consequences. Developed areas are threatened with billions of dollars in property damage as a result of storm impacts and long-term erosion. Over the last few decades, data on the position of the shoreline has emerged as the principal source of information for local, state, and federal government agencies charged with managing coastal erosion. This measure of the shifting land/water interface is also an important source of information for scientific investigations of coastal change, for determinations of the sediment budget, and for conducting numerical simulations of shoreline change.

    Despite the importance of this measure of coastal change, the methods available for collecting shoreline position data are very limited. The most commonly applied method-shoreline interpretation from aerial photography-is expensive, labor-intensive, and involves a considerable amount of subjectivity in identifying the shoreline. There is a significant need for a method that can provide an unambiguous and repeatable measure of shoreline position, can cover large sections of coast within a single low tide period, is inexpensive to operate, and can be used for both long-term monitoring and rapid-response surveys of storm impacts. In response to this need, the USGS developed SWASH, a vehicle-based system for measuring shoreline position which utilizes recent advances in the Global Positioning System (GPS). SWASH stands for "Surveying Wide-Area Shorelines."