Assessing climate change impacts on the stability of small tidal inlet systems: Why and how?

This article summarises potential CC impacts on the stability of STIs and discusses means by which these CC impacts maybe quantified using existing modelling tools. As presently available process based models cannot be confidently applied with concurrent time varying water level, wave and riverflow forcing over typical CC impact assessment time scales (~ 100 years), a 'snap-shot' simulation (~ 1 year duration) approach using process based coastal area morphodyamic models is proposed for qualitative assessments of CC impacts on STIs. As the modelling approach will by necessity depend on the level of data availability, two different 'snap-shot' modelling frameworks for 'data rich' and 'data poor' environments are presented. Process based multi-scale coastal area morphodynamic models and scale aggregated (or reduced complexity) morphodynamic models are identified as modelling approaches that may be pursued in the future to obtain more reliable assessments of CC impacts on STI stability.