Wave Climate, Sediment Transport and Shoreline Evolution in the West Littoral of Algeria.

The littoral zone of the western part of Algeria is an area which has experienced significant modification in the last two decades. This paper highlights the hydro-sedimentary processes and historical shoreline evolution on the west coast of Oran. To this effect, the present work is divided into three parts: (1) a wave climate study has been established over a period of 30 years, based on Infoplaza data. (2) an assessment of sediment transport using wave data. The first method consists of estimating the longshore sediment transport rate (LSTR) from local parameters using three empirical formulas: CERC (CERC (1984) Shore protection manual (Vol. 1). Department of the Army, Waterways Experiment Station, Corps of Engineers, Coastal Engineering Research Center, p 337), Kamphuis (Kamphuis JW (2013) Uncertainty, research, science and engineering in coastal dynamics. In: The 7th International Conference on Coastal Dynamics, Arcachon, pp 927–936) and Van Rijn (Rijn, Coast Eng 90:23–39, 2014)), the results show that (LSTR) values were 8.7 × 10⁵, 9.8 × 10⁵ and 49 × 10⁵ m³/year. Second, a numerical simulation was carried out by the coupled model Mike 21/3 according to the sea conditions at the local scale. (3) a diachronic shoreline evolution from 1980 to 2021 based on aerial photographs and satellite images using the Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS). Based on 1191 transects, the rate of shoreline change analyzed between 1980 and 2021 indicates that the study area was slightly eroding (51%) with a rate varies between − 0.91 and + 4.02 m/year. The results of the wave simulation indicated that, waves coming from the northeast have an average wave height varies from 0.78 to 2.4 m, driven a longshore current of 0.3–0.7 m/s. The highest erosion rates were recorded in the bay of Ain El Turk and Bousfer and the highest accretion rate was measured in the Andalouses coast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]