Climate Change Impacts on the Stability of Small Tidal Inlets

This work explores coastal zones in the vicinity of tidal inlets, which are commonly utilized for navigation, sand mining, waterfront developments and fishing and recreation, are under particularly high population pressure and will only be exacerbated by foreshadowed climate change (CC). Although few recent studies have investigated CC impacts on very large tidal inlet systems, the nature and magnitude of CC impacts on the more commonly found small tidal inlets (STIs) remains practically un-investigated to date. The combination of pre-dominant occurrence in developing countries, socio-economic relevance and low community resilience, general lack of data, and high sensitivity to seasonal forcing makes STIs potentially very vulnerable to CC impacts.

This study was undertaken to develop methods and tools that can provide insights on potential CC impacts on STIs, and to demonstrate their application to assess these CC impacts. Two process based snap-shot modeling approaches for data poor and data rich environments are used to assess CC impacts and an innovative reduced complexity model is developed to obtain rapid predictions of CC impacts on the STI’s stability. Results show that STIs are unlikely to change their types, but that their stability level is likely to change under CC impacts. The main driver for the change is the future variations in wave directions, not SLR as is commonly thought.

Duong Minh Trang obtained her Bachelor Degree at the Water Resources University, Hanoi, in 2007. In 2008, she started her MSc studies at UNESCO-IHE, Delft, The Netherlands. During her MSc she specialised in the Coastal Science Engineering and Port Development program within the Water Science and Engineering Department. For the MSc research component, Trang undertook a Deltares funded study on the hydrodynamics of fringing reef systems which involved one of the first applications of Xbeach to reef environments.

Trang graduated in 2010. After that she commenced with her PhD research, which was a central part of the multi-stakeholder project CC-SIOTI, involving several research groups from Sri Lanka (University of Moratuwa, University of Peradeniya, and the Foundation for Environment Climate and Technology), Thailand (Asian Institute of Technology), Australia (CSIRO), and The Netherlands (UNESCO-IHE and Deltares).

During her entire PhD candidature, Trang was hosted by the Harbour, Coastal and Offshore Engineering section at Deltares. The project was supported via the UPARF research program funded by the Dutch Foreign Ministry (DGIS) and UNESCO-IHE under DUPC programmatic funding. Trang has published several journal and conference articles to date.