Wave Transformation and Alongshore Sediment Transport Due to Obliquely Oriented Shoreface-connected Ridges

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The present work is funded by the United States Geological Survey Hurricane Sandy, Fire Island Physical Processes Study under project number 2006V38. I want to thank my advisor, Dr. Kevin Haas, for giving me the chance to join his research team, supporting me with my work, teaching me patiently, giving me advice in every aspect and for repeatedly reviewing my thesis. The past year has been a big change for me, and Dr. Haas understood me, believed me and gave me so many opportunities to improve myself and achieve what I want to accomplish in both my work and my life. I also thank my committee members, Yang for the preparation and background work before I joined this project. Thank you to Donghua Cai for sharing information about tricks and useful tools in Matlab and in Linux language. Also, thank you and Runze Miao for all the time we spent together, classes we took and exams we prepared together. I thank my roommate, Wen Xu, for helping me through all the difficult time and for preparing dinner for me when I am busy. Thank you to my father and my mother, who have been very supportive of my choice, encouraging me and portraying a prosperous future that they believe I am capable of living. 1 Site map of study area. Insert shows Long Island, NY, and location of NDBC buoy 44025. Main map identifies several features along Fire Island with color shading of recent bathymetry (Warner et al., 2014) showing the shoreface-attached ridges on the western side and a more planar shelf on the eastern side.. 2 (a) The seabed topography map of the Atlantic ocean near Long Island rotated by 12 o clockwise. The region of interest is marked by a rectangle with a white edge color. (b) Seabed topography for the study area extracted from the rectangle in the rotated region map and enlarged. 3 Residual ridges of the study area computed by subtracting the along-shore mean depth from the natural topography. Magenta represents straight lines with an angle of −60 4 Bathymetry validation through the comparison of (a) alongshore averaged profile; (b) alongshore standard deviation; (c)-(f) different along-shore sections of natural bathymetry (red) and synthetic bathymetry 5 Method for running SWAN. (a) The first SWAN run using bathymetry without ridge field with regular grid. (b) The second SWAN run using bathymetry with ridge field with nonuniform …