A new teaching resource is available for teaching beach morphodynamics to university-level students:

Gallop, S.L., Harley, M.D., Brander, R.W., Simmons, J., Splinter, K.D., Turner, I.L. 2017. Assessing cross-shore and alongshore variation in beach morphology due to wave climate: Storms to decades. Oceanography 30(3), 120–125. https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.304

This open-access paper has just been published in Oceanography and consists of workshops focused on learning how to use beach profile data to investigate how beaches respond to wave forcing during storms and over climatic cycles. The workshops utilize 40 years of beach monitoring data from Narrabeen-Collaroy Beach Survey Program in NSW, Australia managed by the Water Research Laboratory, UNSW, which was made available online in 2016. The workshops are aimed at undergraduate students at various levels and can be easily adapted, for which we provide some suggestions.

Narrabeen-Collaroy Beach [Image Credit: Water Research Laboratory, UNSW Sydney]

Developing these workshops has been a collaboration between Macquarie University and UNSW, and involved WICGE committee members Dr Shari Gallop and Dr Kristen Splinter, who worked with Dr Mitch Harley, A/Prof. Rob Brander, Joshua Simmons and Prof. Ian Turner.

While the dataset is focused on an Australian site, the workshops teach generic skills in processing and analyzing beach profile data that will be useful globally. The paper which details the workshops is available online here.