Digital Tide-Coordinated Shoreline

Abstract

Abstract The shoreline is one of the most important features on earth's surface. It is valuable to a diverse user community. But the dynamic nature of the shoreline makes it difficult to be represented in a naturally dynamic style and to be utilized in applications. The officially used shoreline, for example in nautical charts, is the so-called tide-coordinated shoreline. It is also the shoreline that makes the computation of shoreline changes and associated environmental changes meaningful. Mapping of the tide-coordinated shoreline has been very costly. On the other hand, instantaneous shorelines extracted from different data sources may be available. Also, high-resolution satellite and airborne imagery have the capacity of stereo imaging and can be used to extract instantaneous shorelines at a high accuracy and low cost. This article proposes an approach to derivation of digital tidecoordinated shorelines from (a) those instantaneous shorelines and (b) digital coastal surface models and a digital water surface model. Some preliminary study results, analysis, and the potential of the approach are discussed. Keywords: Shoreline Tide-COORDINATED Shoreline Coastal Terrain Model Water Surface Model