An evaluation of two alongshore transport equations with field measurements

The performance of two well-known equations to predict the depth-averaged alongshore suspended sediment flux [Van Rijn, L.C., 1984. Sediment transport, part 11: suspended load transport. journal of Hydraulic Engineering 110, 1613-1641; and Bailard, J.A., 1981. An energetics total load sediment transport model for a plane sloping beach. Journal of Geophysical Research 86,10938-10954] was assessed by comparing predictions with 2306 field estimates based on a vertical stack of three optical backscatter sensors and a single electromagnetic flow meter. The observations were collected at four cross-shore positions on the intertidal beach of Egmond aan Zee, the Netherlands, during calm to storm conditions, with the offshore significant wave height peaking at 3.7 m. Measured hydrodynamics were employed in the computations of both models. Also, default parameter values were used without calibration to the data. We found that both models underpredicted the observations. Overall, the Van Rijn model outperformed the Bailard model, with about 70% of the model prediction lying between 1/5 to 5 of the observations under energetic conditions. For the Bailard model this was only about 20%. The performance of the Van Rijn model is, however, sensitive to the wave-related roughness, one of its highly uncertain free parameters. This may allow for an easy calibration when estimates of the depth-averaged alongshore sediment flux are available but may lead to serious errors in situations without data to constrain the predictions. We suspect that the discrepancy between the observations and model predictions is due to an overestimation of the observed fluxes (high turbidity, air bubbles) and an underestimation of the modeled fluxes because of missing physics related primarily to breaking waves.