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Pacific shoreline erosion and accretion patterns controlled by El Niño/Southern Oscillation

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Abstract

In the Pacific Basin, the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant mode of interannual climate variability, driving substantial changes in oceanographic forcing and impacting Pacific coastlines. Yet, how sandy coasts respond to these basin-scale changes has to date been limited to a few long-term beach monitoring sites, predominantly on developed coasts. Here we use 38 years of Landsat imagery to map shoreline variability around the Pacific Rim and identify coherent patterns of beach erosion and accretion controlled by ENSO. On the basis of more than 83,000 beach transects covering 8,300 km of sandy coastline, we find that approximately one-third of all transects experience significant erosion during El Niño phases. The Eastern Pacific is particularly vulnerable to widespread erosion, most notably during the large 1997/1998 El Niño event. By contrast, La Niña events coincide with significant accretion for approximately one-quarter of all transects, although substantial erosion is observed in southeast Australia and other localized regions. The observed regional variability in the coastal response to ENSO has important implications for coastal planning and adaptation measures across the Pacific, particularly in light of projected future changes in ENSO amplitude and flavour.

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Fig. 1: Regional patterns of shoreline response to ENSO along the Pacific Rim.
Fig. 2: Teleconnections between wave energy flux and ENSO phases along the Pacific Rim.
Fig. 3: Teleconnections between sea-level anomalies and ENSO phases along the Pacific Rim.
Fig. 4: Temporal patterns in regional shoreline erosion between 1984 and 2021.

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Data availability

The full satellite-derived shoreline dataset generated and analysed in the current study is available in the following Zenodo data repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4760144. The data are also displayed on an interactive web portal at http://coastsat.wrl.unsw.edu.au/. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The source code to map satellite-derived shorelines from Landsat imagery (CoastSat) is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2779293. The source code to estimate beach slopes from satellite-derived shorelines and modelled tides (CoastSat.slope) is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3872442.

Change history

  • 13 March 2023

    In the version of this article initially published, the box labels in the top-left corner of the four panels in Figs. 1–3, now each reading as (a) El Niño — boreal winter (DJF), (b) La Niña — boreal winter (DJF), (c) El Niño — all seasons, and (d) La Niña — all seasons, were originally omitted. The errors have been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the United States Geological Survey/NASA for providing high-quality open-access data to the scientific community, Google Earth Engine for facilitating the access to the archive of publicly available satellite imagery, NOAA for maintaining updated time series of the major climate indices, ECMWF for the reanalysis ERA5 data and multi-mission altimetry dataset, CNES/LEGOS/CLS/AVISO for producing the global tide model FES2014 and F. Briol for developing the Python wrapper and the OpenStreetMap project and contributors (https://www.openstreetmap.org) for their extensive geospatial database. We also thank R. Ibaceta for his input and insightful discussions on ENSO and shoreline change. The lead author was supported by a UNSW Scientia PhD scholarship.

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K.V., M.H.D., I.L.T. and K.D.S. devised the study, designed the figures and wrote the manuscript. K.V. processed the data (shorelines, waves and sea-level anomalies) and performed the analysis. All authors discussed the results and reviewed the manuscript. M.H.D., I.L.T. and K.D.S. jointly supervised this work.

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Correspondence to Kilian Vos.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Juilan O’Grady, Patrick Barnard, Mark Dickson and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling editor: Tom Richardson, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Vos, K., Harley, M.D., Turner, I.L. et al. Pacific shoreline erosion and accretion patterns controlled by El Niño/Southern Oscillation. Nat. Geosci. 16, 140–146 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-01117-8

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