During the winter of 2013-2014, Europe's Atlantic coastline suffered from what researchers call the "most energetic" storms the country has seen in seven decades.
Strong, repeated storms in Western Europe are part of a growing trend that has the potential to dramatically impact coastal communities and permanently alter the beach gradient, coastal alignment and nearshore bar position.
To get a better idea of how such changes may impact the country, researchers from the University of Plymouth compared, modeled and measured data from sites across Scotland, Ireland, England, France, Portugal, Spain and Morocco.
Their analyses revealed that the extreme weather events of 2013-2014 were the most energetic since at least 1948. Furthermore, the severe storms exposed open-coast sites in the U.K. and France, causing extensive beach and dune erosion due to offshore sediment transport. Researchers estimate the total sediment loss was as much as 200 cubic meters for every 1-meter strip of beach.
"We have previously conducted research showing the devastating effects caused to the U.K. by the stormy winter of 2013-14," said lead author Gerd Masselink, who is a professor of coastal geomorphology at Plymouth University. "But the damage caused to coastal communities there was replicated - and in some cases exceeded - across western France. All but one of the sites assessed for this study reached their most depleted state at the end of the 2014 winter, and it will take many years for them to fully recover."
Researchers also noted that storm data collected from the eastern Atlantic, stretching from Morocco to northwest Scotland showed that extreme wave conditions occurred up to five times more frequently during the winter of 2013-2014 and that winter wave heights were up to 40 percent higher than average.
Previouly, Plymouth University researchers found that the same violent winter storms had created massive waves - up to eight meters high - that struck the cliffs in Porthleven, West Cornwall, during January and February. Using seismometers, laser scanners and video cameras to evaluate the impact, researchers found the waves had caused a magnitude of shaking greater than ever previously recorded.
Although violent storms, such as hurricanes, are relatively rare in western Europe, climate scientists suggest they could increase as temperatures rise over the next century.
"The extreme winter of 2013-14 is in line with historical trends in wave conditions and is also predicted to increasingly occur due to climate change according to some of the climate models, with the winter of 2015-16 also set to be among the stormiest of the past 70 years," added Tim Scott, one of the study researchers and a lecturer in ocean exploration at Plymouth University. "Whether due to more intense and/or more frequent storms, it should undoubtedly be considered in future coastal and sea defense planning along the Atlantic coast of Europe."
Their study was recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
