Morphological modelling of the response to a shipwreck - A case study at Cape Town

A simulation of the morphological development and degrade of a salient behind a shipwreck located north of Cape Town, South Africa is presented. The morphological model is based on a hybrid morphological model concept which combines a 2D coastal model for calculating sediment transport with a simplified 1D morphological evolution model for the coastline. The model concept is applied to the case study in order to show how the modelling concept may be applied to real coastlines with general bathymetric features. The results show that the model captures the overall morphological response fairly well without the need for extensive calibration which is often required by traditional 2D morphological models. This is attributed by the authors to the fact that the sediment transport description is based on a process based model that captures the most important features, while neglecting the often challenging description of the cross-shore sediment transport.