Video Monitoring and Field Measurements of a Rapidly Evolving Coastal System: the River Mouth and Sand Spit of the Mataquito River in Chile

Abstract

The understanding of morphological processes controlling the evolution of sand spit reformation after a tsunami impact is a challenging and interesting topic, especially in highly energetic and micro tidal environments. A field campaign performed during December 2012 at the Mataquito River mouth in Chile, allowed us to simultaneously monitor topo-bathymetry evolution, wave climate, tidal range, swash zone dynamics and upper beach face evolution over a portion of its sand spit. A video system was set up for a continuous and long-term monitoring of the evolution of the river mouth and sand spit. Primarily, in this work we focus on the application of a videoderived shoreline detection method to assess shoreline evolution and beach cusps migration at hourly scales. We test the method performance on short-term episodic migration of beach cusps recorded during the campaign. Beach face variations at a daily scale were observed, which can be attributed to the migration of beach cusps in the alongshore direction, and linked to wave forcing and alongshore sediment transport.