Modelling infiltration on gravel beaches with an Xbeach variant

Coarse-grained beaches are particularly prevalent in the UK, composed of accumulations of either gravel, or mixed sand and gravel sediments. Understanding and predicting their morphological behaviour in response to short-term and long-term forcing has been the subject of recent research. Despite the focus on sandy beaches, it is important to understand that the balance of processes that govern different behaviour between sandy and gravel beaches. In this study we show how a public domain numerical model, XBeach, developed for sandy environments (Roelvink et al., 2009) can be modified for use in predicting the cross-shore profile changes of gravel beaches. Improvements investigated here include: use of Lagrangian interpretation of velocity in place of Eulerian for driving sediment movement; incorporation of Packwood’s (1983) pragmatic model of infiltration in the unsaturated area of the swash region; introducing of new morphological module based upon Soulsby’s (1997) sediment transport equation for waves and currents. These changes are suggested in order to significantly improve the application of this model to gravel beaches, especially with regard to swash velocity asymmetry which is responsible for development of the steep accretionary phase steep berm above waterline. The results from the model agree well with the measured experimental data and improve upon the results presented by Pedrozo-Acuña et al. (2006)