17) Coastal Typologies for Modeling Coastal Erosion on the North Slope of Alaska
Oceanographic conditions are known to be a key driver in erosion and flooding characteristics along the Alaskan North Slope coastline. The height, duration, and temperature of the ocean water interacting with the permafrost will drive the resulting impacts. To achieve process-based representations of these impacts relevant to the entire coastline, a typological approach has been taken to represent the offshore conditions. Typologies of the offshore wave environment and the nearshore bathymetric environment are used to reduce the full dataset to a much smaller set of most prototypical members representative of the full dataset. Nearshore wave environments are dominantly controlled by their bathymetric characteristics and the offshore forcing. Hence offshore wave environment typologies are developed and presented. Additionally nearshore bathymetric typologies are developed and presented. Combinatorial combinations of these allow for accurate water contact histories to be used in other process based models to assess impact and upscale the results. A novel modeling approach to account for shoreline orientation in the nearshore environment is presented with the intent of garnering feedback.