This book represents the efforts of over a hundred individuals who planned and executed the NSTS field experiments, analyzed the billions of data points, and distilled their findings and insights into the summaries found here. Because these experiments were of a scope that will seldom, if ever, be duplicated, and because the program brought together many of the foremost field experimentalists in this country, we all felt from the beginning that it was important to preserve the outcome. This was done in two ways. First, the raw data were made available to any interested investigator within 18 months of the completion of each experiment. Secondly, both the methodology of the experiments and the findings from them were codified in the form of a monograph. This book is that result. I have had the occasion recently (Sediments '87 Proceedings, Vol. 1, pp. 642-651) to assess the NSTS performance. I found that we made giant strides in our understanding of the surf zone hydrodynamics --far more than our fondest expectations at the beginning. We were able to do less than we had hoped about the response of the sediment, largely because of a limited ability to measure it at a point. As I reported in the Sediments '87 assessment, we established a new state of the art in measurement techniques and we demonstrated the effectiveness of large, multi-investigator, instrument-intensive experiments for studying nearshore processes.

Inhalt

1. The Nsts Field Experiment Sites.- A. Torrey Pines Experiment.- B. Santa Barbara Experiment.- C. Rudee Inlet Experiment.- 2. Measuring The Incident Wave Field.- A. Torrey Pines Experiment.- B. Santa Barbara and Rudee Inlet Experiments.- 3. Measuring the Nearshore Morphology.- A. Methods for Position Control and Beach Face Profiling.- B. Offshore Surveys.- 4. Measuring Surf Zone Dynamics.- A. General Measurements.- B. Field Measurements of Rip Currents.- C. Measurement Errors for Electromagnetic Current Meters.- 5. Measuring Sediment Dynamics.- A. Discrete Sampling of Bedload and Suspended Load.- B. Continuous Bedload Sampling.- C. Continuous Suspended Load Sampler.- 6. Transport Determination by Tracers.- A. Tracer Theory.- B. Application of Tracer Theory to NSTS Experiments.- 7. Data Recording.- A. NSTS Data System.- B. Wave Network System.- 8. Wind Wave Transformation.- 9. Run-Up and Surf Beat.- 10. Nearshore Circulation.- A. Conservation Equations for Unsteady Flow.- B. Rip Currents and Wave Groups.- 11. Suspended Sediment Measurements.- A. Continuous Measurements of Suspended Sediment.- B. Discrete Measurements of Suspended Sediment.- 12. Cross-Shore Transport.- 13. Measuring Longshore Transport with Tracers.- 14. Measuring Longshore Transport with Traps.- 15. Models for Surf Zone Dynamics.- 16. State of the Art in Oscillatory Sediment Transport Models.- 17. Modeling Cross-Shore Transport.- Indexes.- A. Author Index.- B. Subject Index.