Morphological developments after a beach and shoreface

Typically a beach is out of equilibrium after a nourishment is installed. To observe how a nourished beach behaves on the timescale of storms a monitoring campaign was set up at Vlugtenburg beach after a nourishment in the spring of 2009. Here we show a sediment budget analysis of the first 2.5 years for a coastal domain spanning 1750 m alongshore from-9 to +5 m NAP. To investigate the redistribution of nourished sand different sections of the profile are examined. Observations show that the initial response (first 6 to 12 months after construction) is large where the sediment eroded from the beach is transported offshore to form a subtidal bar. In the following period (until present) the losses in the domain are on the order of 40 m3 per m alongshore per year. These losses are concentrated in the profile around the waterline