Beach morphodynamics: a brief review

Abstract

Since the early 1930's, beach profiles have been broadly classified in one of the two types: storm profiles or swell profiles associated, respectively, with steep or low waves. Changes in beach profiles involves so many variables that becomes very difficult to obtain a model which can account for a sucessfull explanation or prediction of these changes. Only in the early 1970's. the sediment characteristics, the process of wave transformation in shallow waters and the coupling between the three-dimensional morphology and the hydrodynamics were sistematically analyzed in order to get a better understanding of the processes responsible for beach changes and its evolutionary sequences. In this paper a brief review about the sucessfull beach morphodynamic models developed by the Australian school of coastal geomorphology is presented as well as some results of this approach applied to some of the southern and southeastern Brazilian beaches.