Preliminary results

Not the whole weekend was for play (visiting Amsterdam), but also some serious data analysis has commenced. All teams have been huddling around their laptops over the weekend and in addition the UNSW team has been keeping an eye on the water levels in the flume (Johan kindly gave up an hour on Saturday and Sunday to chapperone - much appreciated!). Your chief blogger has been doing what he does best: plotting a beach profile! See below for the morphological development during Series A1 (H = 0.92 m; T = 8 s; sea and lagoon = 3 m). The bottom line is that we are already building a bar (and a small berm) and are loosing quite a lot of sand from the swash zone and inner surf zone. Not quite as expected ... actually, this is a bit of an understatement, because we expected the opposite response! Reasons are related to the finer than expected sediment size and the larger than expected wave heights. We might have to do some changes to the next set of wave conditions ...

Beach morphological change during test series A1. Red line is the beach profile before the test and the blue line is after 5 hours of wave action. The green circle is the Southampton rig, the blue circles are the Utrecht rigs (ridiculously well-positioned around the emerging bar feature) and the red circles are the Plymouth/Delaware swash  rigs that are well on their way to become inner surf zone rigs.