Basic concepts

The poster attached to this volume presents the charac-teristics of a new model for beach nourishment interventions and some of its applications and tests related to the case of Ladispoli beach (Latium coast, Italy). The Grain-size Nourishment Model (GNM) gives assistance to the overall beach-recovery project: from the optimization of the nourishment design, to the post-intervention monitoring studies, to the project of beach maintenance by periodic sediment refills. However, the main task of the model concerns the simulation of different types of nourishment interventions virtualized through input variables. The outputs consist of 3D scenarios that contain the elements forecast by the model for the nourishment design. The process of prediction does not incorporate anything from other methods (Van De Graav et al., 1991; Larson et al., 1999; Pranzini, 1999; Capobianco et al., 2002). In fact, the model ignores the widely used concept of equilibrium profile (Dean, 1991; Pilkey et al., 1993) and rejects the assumption of other sedimentological techniques which concerns the granulometric reconversion of the borrow sands in the native ones by wave-washing processes (Krumbein an