Wave Thrust Values Along Massachusetts and Rhode Island Shorelines

Wave thrust values mapped along shorelines quantify wave attack on eroding salt marshes. The product uses a consistent methodology with horizontal resolutions of order hundreds of meters to simulate waves under different climatological wind conditions. Alfredo L Aretxabaleta, Zafer Defne, and Neil K Ganju of the United States Geological Survey generated this data.

Use Cases

• Modeling lateral erosion of salt marshes based on wave thrust metrics.
• Assessing coastal vulnerability to wave attack based on weighted-average wave thrust calculations.
• Simulating wave dynamics in estuarine and bay areas using ADCIRC/SWAN model outputs.
• Analyzing spatial variations in wave energy along oriented coastlines.

Strengths

• Methodology is consistent and provides sufficient spatial resolution to include distinct features of each marsh system.
• Wave simulations under different climatological wind forcing conditions were conducted using the coupled ADCIRC/SWAN model system.
• The product considers the frequency of occurrence of wind conditions to reconstruct a weighted-average wave thrust.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• Row count and file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

United States Geological Survey

Collection Method

Waves were simulated using the coupled ADCIRC/SWAN model system; wave thrust was calculated as the vertical integral of the dynamic pressure of waves.

Geography

Shorelines of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, USA