COMPUTATION OF ALONGSHORE ENERGY AND LITTORAL TRANSPORT

Abstract

This work encompasses a study of the littoral regime of a section of the coastline of the city and county of San Francisco, California The study included a complete refraction analyses of all applicable deep water wave directions and periods, the determination of breaker locations, and a computation of alongshore energy and potential littoral transport for seven stations located just offshore along the thirty foot depth contour The waves are refracted from deep water locations to the shoreline using the Stanford Wave Refraction computer program Wave breaking is assumed to take place whenever the computed wave height exceeds 0 78 times the local water depth The effect of limiting the refraction coefficient is explored since the refraction theory, in analogy with its parent theory of geometric optics, fails along caustic curves and predicts unreasonably large values for the refraction coefficient.