Mg. Villagrán-Valenzuela, Mauricio

2014, Rodrigo Cienfuegos, Mg. Villagrán-Valenzuela, Mauricio, Juan C. Aguilera, Patricio Catalán, Bruno Castelle, Rafael Almar

The understanding of morphological processes controlling the evolution of sand spit reformation after a tsunami impact is a challenging and interesting topic, especially in highly energetic and micro tidal environments. A field campaign performed during December 2012 at the Mataquito River mouth in Chile, allowed us to simultaneously monitor topo-bathymetry evolution, wave climate, tidal range, swash zone dynamics and upper beach face evolution over a portion of its sand spit. A video system was set up for a continuous and long-term monitoring of the evolution of the river mouth and sand spit. Primarily, in this work we focus on the application of a video-derived shoreline detection method to assess shoreline evolution and beach cusps migration at hourly scales. We test the method performance on short-term episodic migration of beach cusps recorded during the campaign. Beach face variations at a daily scale were observed, which can be attributed to the migration of beach cusps in the alongshore direction, and linked to wave forcing and alongshore sediment transport.