Nearshore Physical Oceanography: Recent Trends and Future Prospects

This paper reviews the evolution of nearshore physical oceanography over the past forty years. Over this period there have been enormous changes in the equipment, computing power and concepts used by nearshore physical oceanographers. The greatest change in observational equipment has been the development of remote sensing methods which are now providing spatial mapping of nearshore features and their temporal changes over time periods ranging from seconds to decades. The vast increase in computing power is also transforming the field from reliance on simplified analytical theories to comparisons with fully physical numerical simulations in realistic domains. Conceptually, the field has evolved from a Newtonian deterministic approach to a realization of the importance of the stochastic nature of the environment and of interactions between different aspects of the nearshore system.