Abstract

This paper presents a new approach for modeling shoreline change due to wave energy effects from remotely sensed data. The multi SAR data were employed to extract wave spectra information and integrate them with historical remotely sensed data such as aerial photography data to model shoreline change rates. A partial differential equation (PDF) of the wave conversation model was applied to investigate the wave refraction patterns. The volume of sediment transport at several locations was estimated based on the wave refraction patterns. The shoreline change model was designed to cover a 14 km stretch of shoreline of Kuala Terengganu in peninsular Malaysia. The results showed that the shoreline change rate modeled from the quasi-linear wave spectra model has a significant relationship with one modeled from historical vector layers of aerial photography, SAR data. With the velocity bunching model an error of ± 0.18 m/year in shoreline change rate determination was obtained.

Key words: Synthetic aperture radar (SAR), shoreline, velocity bunching, partial differential equation (PDF).