Modeling Wind-wave driven Shoreline Erosion in the Corsica and Choptank Estuaries, Chesapeake Bay

Wave-drive shoreline erosion constitutes a fundamental challenge to the coastal communities and this is ever becoming more acute under climate change conditions. Over the years scientists are exploring ways to quantify shoreline erosion and progresses have been made during the last decades that shoreline erosion is related to wind wave power, bank height, water depth and the shoreline erodibility. We parameterized these new findings into the state-of-the-art model system, the Semi-implicit Cross-scale Hydroscience Integrated System Model (SCHISM) and applied the coupled system to the Corsica River and Choptank estuaries (Chesapeake Bay) where field measurements were available. SCHSIM employs unstructured grid with high resolution and is particularly suitable for coastal dynamics simulations. In addition to bank property observation data, digitized historical coastline cartographs were analyzed to assess shoreline erosion. The model application was largely data-driven and calibrated with the cartographic shoreline erosion data. The simulation revealed that shoreline erosion occurred more in winter and fall than in summer due to frequent strong winds. In general, the southern banks experienced more severe wind wave impact than the northern bank due to predominant northly winds. Also, the lower estuary experienced higher shoreline erosion than in the upper estuary where wind fetch is limited. Detailed model parameterization and simulation results will be presented at the conference.