Objective
The PACE project has the objective to validate, improve and extend engineers'and scientists' capabilities to understand and reliably predict the large-scale morphological behaviour of sandy coasts and to bring this product closer to the end users (coastal zone managers, public dicision makers). To that end, coastal morphodynamic processes are observed, analysed and modelled at scales much larger than those of the predominant variations of the system's input and its constituent hydrodynamic and sediment transport processes. Four interwoven avenues will be followed to achieve these goals, viz. - "data-driven modelling", trying to describe the observed coastal behaviour in mathematical terms without going into the underlying dynamics, - analysis of the morphodynamic system's inherent stability, i.e. its tendency to form rhythmic morphological features, - "upscaling" from detailed descriptions of waves, currents and sediment transport in interaction with the changing bed topography, - qualitative modelling, meant to provide convincing information to lay people involved in decision-making processes concerning coastal zone management.
The project builds upon the knowledge of detailed physical processes which has been developed in MAST-I, MAST-II and similar programmes, on the world's best long-term data and on a worldwide network which provides links with a number of similar research projects in Australia, the U.S.A. and Poland. Thus it brings together a large part of the world's most prominent researchers in thiS field, giving them access to each others models, to the data they need and to a number of end users of their knowledge.
It involves more than 50 senior researchers and a similar number of junior researchers from 17 institutes in European countries and Australia. The basic working units are five "Topics", dealing with
l) decadal scale modelling,
2) very-large-scale modelling (centuries and more),
3) the analysis and prediction of large-scale bar and sandbank systems, 4) tidal-inlet submodels for models of barrier-island coasts and 5) the link with the end users.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
7522 NB ENSCHEDE
Netherlands