Longshore sediment transport on Mediterranean coast of Israel

A modified version of the CERC formula, which relates longshore sediment dr ift to deep water wave height and direction, has been used to define the eq uivalent wave height. The directional distribution of these wave heights an d corresponding sediment transport rates and their analytical approximation s are found using statistical analysis of high quality directional wave dat a measured simultaneously at two sites, Ashdod and Haifa. The directional d istributions enable one to determine the directional shift between the aver age 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 c alculations even when the locations are close. A detailed computation of di rectional shift for different ranges of wave heights is performed using cor relation analysis of data sets. The corrections of wave directions at vario us locations along the coast are found by interpolation, and an excellent a greement between sediment fluxes at each location has been obtained when us ing the LITPACK package for littoral transport simulations with each data s et.