Coastal Wind Effects

Wind can have several effects on the processes influencing coastal geomorphology. These include wind stress on the water surface in major storms, such as hurricanes or typhoons, inducing short-term above normal sea elevations or storm surge, short “choppy” waves in estuaries and fetch-limited harbors, downwelling and upwelling processes in the coastal oceans, and sea breeze effects.

Storm surge is caused by the frictional wind stress on the water surface inducing a current in the surface water. Empirically, the resulting current in the top few centimeters of the sea surface will be about 2% of the wind velocity (Komar 1976). For Class 5 storm (hurricane) winds, a considerable mass transport is advected along the sea surface waters in the wind direction, so that onshore storm winds force the seawater up against the land. Of course this occurs concomitantly with large, wind-forced, storm waves. The total wind effect is therefore a combination of both the direct wind stress effect and...