Oceanographic conditions are known to be a key driver in erosion and flooding characteristics along the Alaskan North Slope coastline. The height, duration, and frequency of wave activity, as well as the temperature of the ocean water interacting with the permafrost will drive the resulting impacts. To develop a parameterization for process-based representations of these impacts relevant to the entire coastline, a typological approach (for nearshore and offshore conditions) has been taken.

Typologies of the offshore wave environment and the nearshore bathymetric environment are used to simplify the full dataset to a smaller representative set of the most prototypical members from the full dataset. In most systems, nearshore wave environments are predominantly controlled by their bathymetric characteristics and the offshore forcing. In Arctic environments, sea ice and open water conditions add additional complexity. Therefore, offshore wave environment typologies and nearshore bathymetric typologies have been developed and are presented here. Combining these allows for accurate water contact histories to be used in other process based models to assess impact and upscale the results.

Output from the Delft3D suite of models for two locations on the North Slope - Drew Point and Point Barrow is used to tune the typologies’ based approach. A novel modeling approach to account for shoreline orientation in the nearshore environment is presented with the intent of garnering feedback.