Over the past few decades, natural and nature-based features such as coastal vegetation have garnered increasing interest due to their capacity to provide a myriad of benefits, such as shoreline protection. Commonly referred to as green infrastructure, in contrast to traditional engineered shoreline infrastructure like seawalls, these ecosystems have been studied in an attempt to quantify their protective efficacy (e.g., wave attenuation) and value. This study aims to extend previous work on the complex hydrodynamics of saltmarshes to further examine the role that these systems play in energy attenuation. These findings have highlighted a dependence between attenuation efficacy and underlying forcing frequency, and the proposed work applies the non-hydrostatic mode of the popular wave model XBeach to examine the parameter space surrounding spectral energy dissipation in saltmarsh habitat. Preliminary model runs explore the interdependence between bulk drag coefficient and spectral energy dissipation. Utilizing existing empirical bulk drag formulations, dissipation at varying peak wave frequencies is examined for a range of mean water levels. Results aim to contribute to the improved characterization of how wave fields vary during the passage of a storm surge, where increased inundation of coastal vegetation alters the dynamics of the attenuation response.

Primary Presenter: Matthew Falcone, University of California, Berkeley (matthew_falcone@berkeley.edu)

Authors:

Matthew Falcone, University of California, Berkeley  ()

Mark Stacey, University of California, Berkeley  ()