Waves

Waves play an important part in the morphological changes near the coast. For this reason the wave model SWAN is integrated into the model suite. See Booij et al., (1999) for a description of SWAN. The wave model SWAN is used in the model in 2 ways:

1. The spatial distribution of wave stresses is input for the hydrodynamic module to include the effect of wave driven currents in the total flow pattern. Because of the varying water level during the tide several updates are done during each tide. FINEL2d provides water levels and current fields to SWAN.
   
2. The spatial distribution of the wave orbital motion at the seabed (amplitude and direction), is used to account for wave related bed shear stress to obtain the total shear stress as input for the sediment transport module.

References

Booij, N., R.C. Ris and L.H. Holthuijsen. 1999. A third-generation wave model for coastal regions, Part I, Model description and validation, J. Geoph. Research C4, 104, pp 7649-7666.