Storm clustering and its influence on coastal morphology and defence

海岸带在国家、欧洲和全球层面被广泛认为是重要的，但它正面临着越来越大的气候变化压力。最近政府气候变化委员会2018年报告强调了英国洪水和海岸侵蚀威胁日益增加的紧迫性。它要求改进海岸结构破坏概率的计算，减少海岸侵蚀的不确定性，更好地了解海岸地貌及其对气候变化的反应。更好地了解极端事件的特征以及海岸的动态响应对于实现这些目标至关重要。风暴通过极端海平面和海浪强烈影响英国的海岸洪水和侵蚀。以往的大多数研究和风险评估往往只评估个别风暴的影响，很少考虑不同时间尺度上的风暴事件序列。极端海平面的时间聚集可能导致洪水或侵蚀损害的扩大，这是由于对防御的磨损效应和自然（例如，海岸保护系统内的人工要素（如护岸）。在海岸模型研究中，这些条件几乎总是被认为是静态的，当几个事件快速连续发生时，这可能导致低估洪水和侵蚀风险。建立在一个大型以前EPSRC资助的项目称为洪水记忆，这个博士学位的目的是提高风暴事件序列对硬和软海岸的动态响应的影响的理解。

The coastal zone is widely recognised as important at national, European and global levels, but is facing increasing pressures from climate change. The recent Government's Committee on Climate Change 2018 report highlights the urgency of increasing threats from flooding and coastal erosion in the UK. It calls for improvements in calculation of failure probabilities of coastal structures, reductions in uncertainty about coastal erosion and better understanding of coastal geomorphology, and its response to climate change. Improved understanding of the characteristics of extreme events, and the dynamic response of the coast, is essential to deliver on these aims.Storms strongly influence coastal flooding and erosion in the UK, via extreme sea levels and waves. Most previous studies and risk assessments have tended to only assess the impacts of individual storms and have rarely considered sequences of storm events on different time-scales. Temporal clustering of extreme sea levels could lead to amplified flood or erosion damages due to attritional effects on defences and inadequate recovery/repair time of natural (e.g., beaches) and man-made (e.g. revetments) elements within the coastal protection system. Conditions of these are almost always considered static in coastal modelling studies and this potentially leads to underestimation of flood and erosion risk when several events occur in rapid succession. Building on a large previous EPSRC-funded project called Flood MEMORY, this PhD aims to improve understanding of the impact that sequences of storm events have on the dynamic response of hard and soft coasts.