Create Landmass Polygon with breakwaters, other structures?

Good morning,

Should the land mass polygon include dikes, breakwaters, walls, seaport structures, wave breakers? or what is recommended is only natural land masses.

Thank you so much

Hi @Juanmi_Jurado_C , great question. I think you probably want to include these features, but the landmass polygon has a couple of uses in the model to consider.

  1. The landmass is used to define the coastline within the area of interest, so the model plots shore points along the edge of the landmass and computes the exposure index at those points. So if it does not make sense to assess coastal exposure at points along the perimeter of those walls, then that might be a reason to exclude these features. However,
  2. The landmass itself protects other areas of the shoreline from wind & wave exposure. That process is captured by the “fetch rays” that the model calculates. So for this reason, it makes sense to include features like this in the landmass.

Since those two points are contradictory, there is a way to include features like this in the landmass polygon, but avoid creating shore points along the perimeter of those features: Draw an AOI polygon that contains only the area of the coast that should get shore points - it could be drawn carefully to exclude those breakwaters from the shore point plotting, but will still include them in the wind & wave exposure processes.

2 Likes

Dave Thanks a lot! :muscle:

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