COMPARISON BETWEEN THE RESULTS OF LITTORAL-DRIFT COMPUTATIONS AND CUBATURE OF DEPOSITS IN A DREDGED CHANNEL

Abstract

The total annual volume of littoral drift on either side of the mouth of Sergipe estuary, in the Northeast of Brazil, has been de_ termined by applying Caldwell's, Castanho's and Bijker's methods to the wave characteristics that had been recorded at a twenty-metre depth of water, over a whole year, for the design of an offshore oil terminal. The three computation methods yielded the same order of maj> nitude which was found to amount to about 80000Om^/year. The dominant drift is s outhwes tward, and its predicted amount is 660000m-*/year. It was also found that although the three methods lead to total re suits of the same order of magnitude, they do not agree as to the vari^ ation of littoral drift over the year for the s ame waves. An eight-metre deep shipping channe 1 has been dredgedaccross the bar. The channel was surveyed in December 1971, August and Decem ber 1972, and a cubature of the deposits was made after the littoraldrift computations had been carried out. As the latter had been per formed on a monthly basis, a comparison became possible between pre dieted and actual volumes of deposits for the same lengths of time. The predicted volumes for the whole year were found to be from 34 to 46% greater than the actual results. However, for the time interval August-December 1972 a remarkable agreement was found be^ tween predicted and actual results.