Ninety years of shoreline change at Narrabeen Beach (Australia) from sub-daily to decadal time scales

Narrabeen Beach is 3.6 km-long embayed sandy beach located in southeast Australia on the northern beaches of Sydney. It is well known in the coastal research community for its long-term beach monitoring program, that was commenced in 1976 by Prof. Andy Short and has continued uninterrupted until the present day. This program has led to a number of groundbreaking research advances, including the Wright and Short morphodynamic beach state model, embayed beach rotation and links to climate cycles like the El Niño/Southern Oscillation.

This presentation will present a significant extension of this monitoring program through the inclusion of advanced shoreline monitoring techniques. These techniques include: historical aerial photographs, airborne and fixed Lidar, UAV, satellite-derived shorelines (CoastSat), Argus coastal imaging and CoastSnap citizen science. This large dataset (comprising over 1 million data points) enables an unprecedented look at shoreline change in dynamic, wave-dominated environments on time scales from sub-daily to decadal. The talk will showcase new research derived from this dataset, including data-driven forecast models of shoreline erosion and insights on long-term coastal change. Finally, links to accessing this open-source dataset will be described.