Instrumentation at Holderness

The Holderness Coastal Experiment (Prandle et al. (1996)) originated as a component of the UK LOIS programme. It is essentially the observational phase of a research program aimed at understanding and ultimately predicting coastal erosion. The Holderness coast was chosen because of its rapid rate of erosion (20 m glacial till cliffs eroding at an average rate of 1.7 m/year) and its reasonable homogeneity over a 20 km section. The perceived requirements was for continuous monitoring of representative conditions over a winter period providing data both for developing and verifying numerical models of the region and background descriptions of occasional more intensive localised process studies. Understanding of the mechanisms of sediment transport is the essence of long term prediction of coastal erosion. It is likely that the coastal morphology of Holderness is controlled by a combination of incident wave energy and storm and tidal dynamics and importantly dynamic interactions between these. This paper aims to provide an overview of the instrumentation used to monitor waves and sediments for the Holderness experiment, together with illustrations of the type of data collected from the three phases of deployments. The data collected from this experiment contributes significantly the the MAST projects SCAWVEX and PROMISE, and to the MAFF coastal research program CAMELOT