Spatial variability in beach-face slopes from satellite remote sensing

The beach face is the most seaward region of the dry beach. This region is the primary interface between land and ocean, and therefore has a great influence on coastal processes such as the exchange of sediment between land and sea or the reflection of wave energy at the shoreline. In particular, the slope of the beach-face, is an important parameter in coastal engineering to calculate the vertical and horizontal excursion of wave run-up (Stockdon et al., 2006). Yet, despite the importance of the beach-face slope parameter in many formulations used by coastal engineers, this quantity remains poorly mapped along the world’s sandy coastlines and the absence of large-scale datasets of beach-face slope is presently limiting our ability to deploy coastal inundation forecasting systems (O’Grady et al., 2019). This work describes a novel methodology to estimate beach-face slopes with satellite remote sensing and presents large-scale datasets of beach-face slopes along open-coast sandy coastlines around the Pacific Rim.