Assessing storm erosion hazards

The storm erosion hazard on coasts is usually expressed as an erosion volume and/or associated episodic coastline retreat. The accurate assessment of present-day and future storm erosion volumes is a key task for coastal zone managers, planners and engineers. There are four main approaches that can be used to assess storm erosion volumes for coastal management/planning purposes. These approaches include: extrapolated wave exceedance characteristics (EWEC) approach, synthetic design storm (SDS) approach; Corbella and Stretch (CS) approach; and the joint probability method (JPM) approach. The EWEC and SDS approaches can only return a single deterministic estimate of storm erosion volume associated with a design storm wave height. However, in situations where a hazard assessment study is hindered by budgetary, computational or modelling skill constraints, these approaches may still be used to support coastal management/planning strategies if the user is acutely aware of the caveats associated with thus calculated storm erosion volume estimates.