Contrasting geomorphological storm response from two adjacent shorefaces

Shorefaces play a critical role in cross‐shore sediment transport between the beach and inner shelf, particularly during storm conditions. A comparison and examination of storm‐driven sedimentary changes on two adjacent shorefaces in Northern Ireland, located only 5 km apart, revealed significantly different geomorphological responses. The steeper shoreface at West Strand responded with extensive sediment deposition across almost the entire shoreface, in contrast with the more dissipative and quasi‐linear shoreface at Portstewart, which mostly showed nearshore bar changes. Results from the two sites, which have similar wave/wind characteristics and seabed sediments, suggest that: (i) cross‐shore morphology, (ii) immediately previous (antecedent) shoreface morphodynamic behaviour and (iii) the presence, or lack of, offshore sand appear to be the primary controls on storm‐driven sedimentary changes attributed to the high‐energy event. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysis of Coseismic Fault Slip Models of the 2012 Indian Ocean Earthquake: Importance of GPS Data for Crustal Deformation Studies

Based on continuous GPS data, we analyze coseismic deformation due to the 2012 Indian Ocean earthquake. We use the available coseismic slip models of the 2012 earthquake, derived from geodetic and/or seismic waveform inversion, to calculate the coseismic displacements in the Andaman-Nicobar, Sumatra and Java. In our analysis, we employ a spherical, layered model of the Earth and we find that Java Island experienced coseismic displacements up to 8 mm, as also observed by our GPS network. Compared to coseismic offsets measured from GPS data, a coseismic slip model derived from multiple observations produced better results than a model based on a single type of observation.