Costal Behavior

The public availability of satellite data and new analytical tools for processing big data, such as the Google Earth Engine, enable us to look at coastline migration in a new way. Scripts for automated detection of the land-water boundary generate numerous data points for each part of the European coastline. When averaged by year and analyzed for a decadal period, these data points form the basis for a new pan-European coastline-migration map that covers a consistent time period relevant for present-day coastal-zone management, eliminates data gaps, and portrays a single coastline indicator that is assumed to correspond to the mid-tide land-water boundary. As part of EMODnet-Geology, Gerben Hagenaars at Deltares performed an analysis for tens of thousands of transects with a spacing of 500 meters, giving a map resolution of 1:1,000,000.