Shoreline and Nearshore Wave Data for New South Wales, Australia

This dataset contains the shoreline and nearshore wave data for the entire New South Wales coast. The dataset comprises over 8,000 cross-shore transects spaced at 100-meter intervals along the NSW coast. For each transect, satellite-derived shoreline positions are provided at approximately bi-weekly intervals from 1984 to 2024, along with associated beach-face slopes. Hourly nearshore wave parameters—including significant wave height (H_s), peak period (T_p), mean wave period (T_m02), as well as peak and mean wave directions (D_p and D_m), are provided at the 10 m depth contour for each transect from 1979 to 2024. 

The shoreline data is in CoastSat_shorelines.zip. The data is structured as follows:

• There is a sub folder for each site (e.g. aus0045)
• In the site folder, there are 4 CSV files:
  • time_series_tidally_corrected.csv: this file contains the tidally-corrected time-series of shoreline change along each transect belonging to the site (e.g. aus0045-0001, aus0045-0002 etc). This is the final product used for coastal change analyses.
  • time_series_raw.csv: this file contains the raw time-series of shoreline change, which have not be tidally-corrected. Note that each image is taken at a different stage of the tide.
  • tide_levels_fes2022: this file contains the tide levels at the time of image acquisition extracted from FES2022 (global tide model publicly available on AVISO+).
  • transect_beach_slopes.csv: this file contains the estimated beach slope for each transect.

The wave data is stored in 10 NetCDF files with size ranging from 5 to 10 GB.

• File names (e.g., aus0045_aus0066.nc) indicate the range of beach site IDs included.
• All NetCDF files follow a consistent structure with two dimensions:
  • time (in UTC)
  • tran_id (Transect ID, matching transects_NSW.geojson).
• Variables include: 
  • significant wave height (H_s)
  • peak period (T_p)
  • mean wave periods (T_m01, T_m02)
  • mean wave directions (D_m)
  • peak wave directions (D_p)
• Transect properties include:
  • Longitude and Latitude: longitude and latitude of the intersection point between the extended transect and the 10 m depth contour (where waves are extracted)
  • Distance: distance from the seaward end of the transect to the intersection
  • Angle: angle between the transect and the 10m contour at the intersection

Three supplementary geospatial layers are provided in GeoJSON format:

• ROI_NSW.geojson: the region of interest
• shorelines_NSW.geojson: a reference shoreline for each beach
• transects_NSW.geojson: the location of transects 
• intersections_10m_QA.geojson: intersections of extended transects at 10 m contour with quality assurance.

The validation of shoreline and wave data against groud truth are saved in the Comparison_results.zip