Sensitivity Analysis of Event-Specific Calibration Data and Its Application to Modeling of Subaerial Storm Erosion under Complex Bathymetry

Abstract

Key parameters in a process-based model depicting the morphological changes during storm events should be adjusted to simulate the hydro- and morphodynamics, leading to site-, profile-, and event-specific calibration. Although area models eliminate variability in calibrated parameters along with each profile in complex bathymetry, the amount of influence datasets with different wave conditions have on model performance is still unclear in an area model in a given parameter space. This study collected hydrodynamic and bathymetric field data over four different storm conditions (two single and two cluster storms) at Maengbang Beach, South Korea. The numerical model XBeach was adopted using four storm datasets with four key parameters to examine the influence of event-specific calibration data on subaerial storm erosion. When using clustered storm data, a relatively limited number of parameter combinations showed higher model sensitivity to different parameter sets as opposed to single storm data with the same parameter sets. Model sensitivity to different storm events was correlated with cumulative storm power and resultant erosion volume in comparison with other features in the datasets. The results are expected to guide the selection of an event-specific dataset with various morphological and hydrodynamic factors in an area model under complex bathymetry.