The Beach of the Future

Building upon a legacy of coastal science at Scripps, high-tech tools are opening new avenues for researchers to track sand movements and further explain beach systems.

May 2008

By Mario C. Aguilera

Speeding at 150 knots thousands of feet in the air, an airplane sends out a laser pulse to a beach's rippling sands.

From the location of the airplane, the travel time of the laser pulse to the target, and other factors, scientists can determine the height of the sand to within inches.

Enter a new age of coastal science.

Surveys of beach characteristics that historically took hours now can be obtained in seconds. The specially equipped airplane carrying LIDAR, or light detection and ranging technology, is a new tool in Professor Bob Guza's investigations of sand movement and beach erosion. It's part of a high-tech suite helping Guza and his research team at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego better understand shoreline dynamics.

"The technology is just staggering," said Guza.

His research builds upon more than thirty years of wave science pioneered at Scripps through the Coastal Data Information Program, or CDIP. What was started by research engineer Richard Seymour as a more efficient way of transmitting wave data from ocean buoys has blossomed into a robust network that thousands of daily Internet visitors from the weekend surfer to harbor managers to Navy navigators now find indispensable.

Guza's high-tech surveys and analyses are affording his team a new view of sand processes on Southern California beaches. The results could provide new clues about why sand disappears and reappears, and how pounding surf erodes beaches. This is vital information not only for scientists but for property owners and resource managers as coastlines are increasingly threatened by natural and man-made erosion, pollutants, and other hazards.

"Our CDIP team is now bringing together sandy beach observations with CDIP's wave data into a more coherent program that's about shoreline change rather than exclusively waves," said Guza. "Now it's a whole package."

Next page: Seaching for the Grains of Truth

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