Reply to “The morphological response time of nearshore profiles [Plant, Ruessink and Wijnberg, 2001, revisited] by T.J. O’Hare and D.A. Huntley

O’Hare and Huntley identify two problems in Plant et al. [2001] (hereafter, PRW2001), which ultimately lead them to conclude that sandbars and the “equilibrium ” profile (as defined by PRW2001) may interact on the same timescales. We acknowledge the first problem (a mistake in a derivation) and find that the second problem raises an interesting point (how to correctly interpret an ad hoc treatment of Bagnold’s efficiency factor). However, we find that their re-analysis does not support their conclusions, and does not significantly change the conclusions presented in PRW2001. O’Hare and Huntley correctly identified a mistake in equation 13 (an expression for the sediment load supported by an applied bed stress) in PRW2001, where the term written as ρ ρρ −s should have been ρ