The relative importance of waves in predicting the morphology of UK estuaries

Recent developments provide a means of defining the estuary form based on external or pre-defined parameters such as tidal range, river discharge, valley length, nature of the valley bed and the type of sediments available as a supply. This was found to provide a reasonable representation of UK estuaries for properties such as surface area and volume at mean tide level but a much poorer representation of areas and volumes of the low water channel and the tidal flats. The inclusion of an idealised representation of the equilibrium profile generated by wave action was found to significantly improve the predictive power of the model when compared to the properties of 64 UK estuaries