Challenges and opportunities in predicting coastal total water levels from empirical runup models: Insights from major storms in Southeast Australia

Abstract

Total water levels ( TWL ) – the combination of wave-runup, tides, surges and in the future, sea-level rise – stand as a critical variable contributing to coastal inundation during storms. Quantifying the contribution of wave runup to extreme TWL is essential for accurate assessments of coastal inundation risk at wave-dominated coastlines. Despite decades of research, a fundamental challenge for coastal practitioners is selecting from numerous runup models, often constrained by the unavailable site-specific beach slope data. This study presents a novel dataset of TWL observations inferred from marine debris deposits surveyed immediately after storms in New South Wales, Australia. Using this dataset, this work assesses the accuracy of simplified TWL models integrating still water levels, local nearshore wave data, various runup formulae and different beach slope proxies derived from remote sensing technologies. Models utilising historical beach slopes from LiDAR outperformed the models using satellite-derived slopes. Findings suggest that runup formulae calibrated during small-to-moderate wave conditions can be extrapolated to extreme storms when applied to similar sites, emphasising the preference for site-specific formulae over one-model-fits-all approaches. Challenges and opportunities of modelling TWL for coastal inundation assessments are discussed, highlighting the need to incorporate beach slope uncertainties to fully assess inundation impacts as sea-levels rise.