Wave-dune interaction and beach resilience in large-scale physical model tests

Large-scale laboratory experiments focusing on the main physical processes driving dune erosion have been performed in a wave flume with a sandy dune exposed to a combination of water levels and wave conditions (Tomasicchio et al., 2011b) providing observations of different interaction regimes: collapsing, overwash and breaching (Sallenger et al., 2003).The large set of data has been considered to obtain measurements of beach-dune cross-shore profile evolution, hydrodynamic properties and suspended sediment concentration.Results show that erosion develops faster during the first hundred waves, there is a clear influence of wave period (van Gent et al., 2008) and water depth on the resilience of the beach-dune system, and that sediment concentration at a given transect depends on the bar position.Furthermore, the observed data have been adopted to verify the predictive accuracy of two open source process-based profile numerical models.