Barrier Island Morphology
Oral
Michael Poff, PE, MS
President
Coastal Engineering Consultants
Predicting the evolution of Louisiana’s barrier islands is a critical component of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority program for restoring and sustaining their barrier islands. Both empirical and numerical modeling approaches have been utilized for predicting morphologic changes over time. These predictions have been employed for the development of single-island restoration projects, and for the long-term basin-scale modeling. Two case studies will be presented, one for a process-based modeling approach employed for the design of a major island restoration project, and one for a hybrid modeling approach employed for the State’s 2017 Coastal Master Plan barrier island evolution model.