Predicting coastal profile evolution

A long-term prediction of coastal profile evolution is done basing on several years' measurements. The adopted diffusion model is first calibrated against real data obtained from over more than 20 years measurements, and then extrapolated. A realistic prediction is then made by solving numerically a diffusion equation with coefficients obtained by the extrapolated values. In previous studies, taking into account the time dependence of the coefficients, we were able to reduce to 10 years the number of time measurements needed for calibration. Here we consider the possibility of predicting coastal profiles using only 5 years measurements. Numerical experiments made by using the JARKUS dataset have shown that our model is indeed able to predict the depth profile evolution occurring 3 years from now with a relative error less than about 10%.