CIRFA seminar (13 April) – From sea ice to coastal erosion in Svalbard

In our next seminar on 13 April at 14:00 our guest at CIRFA, Zuzanna Świrad from Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences, will present her latest work on coastal erosion:

Elevated water levels on the beach cause flooding and erosion, and pose infrastructure at risk. North Atlantic sector of the Arctic has been experiencing increasing storminess while sea ice extent and duration have been decreasing. In consequence, Arctic coasts are exposed to bigger waves for longer time periods. These phenomena will likely intensify in future. Better understanding of the role of sea ice and storm patterns on the wave energy delivery to the high-latitude shores is needed to predict coastal hazards under changing climate. In this seminar I will focus on the on-going project that combines long-term monitoring, field experiments, remote sensing and modelling to get a comprehensive understanding of the nearshore and coastal processes in Hornsund fjord, Svalbard. The activities include using Sentinel-1 SAR to create high-resolution daily sea ice maps of the fjord, incorporation of the sea ice concentration into Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) model, long-term wind wave measurements, monitoring conditions of the poligenetic shore ice, repetitive surveying of beach morphology, and observations and empirical modelling of wave run-up on the beach.

You are welcome to join our seminar in person at CIRFA or online.