Shingle B: the online tool helping protect and monitor shingle beaches

Shingle beaches occur in relatively few places around the world, with most of them found in the UK, Japan and New Zealand. Instead of consisting of fine sand, they are made up of sediment of coarse beach material in varying sizes from 2mm upwards. Shingle beaches have received much less attention from the research community than sandy beaches, with the result that fewer modelling tools exist to predict changes on shingle beaches. Funded by an Environment Agency flood and coastal erosion risk management grant, New Forest District Council commissioned HR Wallingford, in collaboration with the Channel Coastal Observatory, to develop a shingle beach profiling tool, which can also account for wave conditions which include swell. The new parametric model, Shingle-B, is an online tool, which predicts the profile of shingle beaches, as they respond to bi-modal sea states. www.hrwallingford.com