Longshore sediment transport on Mediterranean coast of Israel

A modified version of the CERC formula, which relates longshore sediment drift to deep water wave height and direction, has been used to define the equivalent wave height. The directional distribution of these wave heights and corresponding sediment transport rates and their analytical approximations are found using statistical analysis of high quality directional wave data measured simultaneously at two sites, Ashdod and Haifa. The directional distributions enable one to determine the directional shift between the average wave directions at both sites and to find the necessary corrections of wave directions at any location along the coast. The results emphasize the importance of accounting for wave directional shift in sediment transport calculations even when the locations are close. A detailed computation of directional shift for different ranges of wave heights is performed using correlation analysis of data sets. The corrections of wave directions at various locations along the coast are found by interpolation, and an excellent agreement between sediment fluxes at each location has been obtained when using the LITPACK package for littoral transport simulations with each data set.