MORPHODYNAMICS OF TWO RIVERINE ESTUARIES IN NSW

Abstract

Australian communities place a very high value on coastal environments and this is reflected with 85 percent of the population living within 50 km of the coast (Clark and Johnston 2016). Estuaries make up a large portion of the coastal environment so it is important to understand how such settings may respond to future pressures. It is generally accepted that estuaries will undergo significant alteration due to climate change related impacts such as sea level rise (SLR) and changes in the frequency and magnitude of storm events (Passeri et al. 2016). Most previous research in southeast Australia has focused on coastal lake estuary types (e.g. Young et al. 2014 and Hart et al. 2019), yet our understanding of how riverine estuary systems (i.e., more mature and infilled systems) will respond to future SLR is much less certain. To increase our understanding of how the morphodynamics of riverine estuaries may change with climate change, this study has investigated the tidal hydrodynamics, water level records, and inlet morphologies of two riverine estuaries in NSW: Boambee Creek (around 500 km north of Sydney) and Camden Haven Inlet (around 350 km north of Sydney).