Callaghan, D. P., Nielsen, P. and Ranasinghe, R., 2007. Estimating extreme beach erosion frequency from a Monte Carlo simulation of wave climate. Journal of Coastal Research, SI 50 (Proceedings of the 9th International Coastal Symposium), 88 – 92. Gold Coast, Australia, ISSN 0749.0208

Recent developments in extreme value modelling has been used to develop a robust and defendable framework for determining coastal erosion hazard on sandy coastlines. This framework reproduced well (within factor 2 up to the 15 year return level) the extreme beach erosion volumes obtained from field measurements at Narrabeen Beach, Australia. This encouraging finding was achieved using a simple beach erosion and accretion model following the equilibrium profile approach with exponential response after KRIEBEL and DEAN (1993). The method includes allowances for joint probability between all basic erosion parameters including; wave height, period and direction, event duration, tidal anomalies and event occurrence intensities. This framework includes event grouping where significantly more erosion can occur. This is handled by simulating the event history and estimating the beach accretion between events.