An empirical model for infragravity swash on barred beaches

Idealized computational simulations with the nearshore model XBeach were carried out for a series of barred beach configurations in order to quantify the impact of nearshore bars on infragravity swash. Results show that nearshore bar systems reduce infragravity swash energy at the shoreline. The amount of swash reduction was found to correlate with both bar depth and rip width, when a rip channel is present. In order to develop a generalized empirical model for significant infragravity swash for barred beaches, the simulations were used to extend the empirical swash model of Stockdon et al. (2006) to include bar characteristics. The developed empirical model relates significant infragravity swash to incident wave conditions and nearshore bar depth. With respect to Stockdon et al. (2006), this new model improves predictive skill by reducing root-mean-square error by 50% for the computational simulations and by 15% when applied to a range of field data.