Wave storm dynamics and clustering, and their impacts on beach erosion

We analyse a 36-year hydrodynamic and morphological dataset from the Hasaki coast, Japan, comprising 501 wave storm events (405 individual and 96 clustered events) to investigate the impact of storm dynamics and clustering on beach erosion. Focusing on the wave component of storms, events are identified using wave height thresholds. Daily and weekly beach profile measurements from the Hasaki Oceanographic Research Station are used to quantify erosion. The study examines the seasonal influences on Hasaki beach, the characteristics and temporal evolution of storms, and their associated erosional impacts. Moreover, we test two supervised machine learning (ML) algorithms, support vector regression (SVR), and deep neural network (DNN), in predicting shoreline change using 16 wave, storm, and morphological features. SVR showed reasonable accuracy on the training dataset but underperformed on testing, while DNN failed to produce reliable predictions on both. With SVR yielding an R² of 0.18 and DNN 0.27 on the testing dataset, we conclude that, given the limited data and available features, such ML models may not generalise well. However, separate analyses using observed data reveal clear seasonal variations in wave storm dynamics and distinct behaviours of clustered events associated with beach erosion, highlighting important insights beyond the ML results.