![\"Science](\"https:\/\/scx1.b-cdn.net\/csz\/news\/800a\/2023\/beach-erosion-satellit.jpg\" "\\"Science")
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Researchers from UNSW Sydney have analyzed millions of satellite photos to observe changes in beaches across the Pacific Ocean. The findings, published in Nature Geoscience<\/i> today (Feb. 10), reveal for the first time how coastlines respond to different phases of the El-Ni\u00f1o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.<\/p>\n
ENSO is a natural climate phenomenon that causes variations in sea surface temperatures<\/a> over the Pacific Ocean. The warming phase, known as El Ni\u00f1o, and the cooling phase, known as La Ni\u00f1a, affect weather patterns<\/a> across different coastlines depending on the cycle.\n<\/p>\n During these periods, coastal erosion<\/a> can also intensify, shifting sand away from beaches and threatening beachfront homes and habitats. But scientists haven’t been able to study this broadly using conventional coastal monitoring techniques, which have been limited to on-ground observations on just a few beaches.\n<\/p>\n “Scientists have known beaches respond to ENSO cycles for decades, but we’ve only been able to paint a small picture of this from a few sporadic beach<\/a> monitoring sites,” says Dr. Mitchell Harley, co-author of the study from UNSW’s Water Research Laboratory at the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering. “For this research, we were able to take a completely different angle to complete the bigger picture of how climate cycles impact entire Pacific coasts.”\n<\/p>\n Satellites orbiting the Earth have captured images of the world’s coastlines at regular intervals for almost forty years. The researchers developed a new open-source tool called CoastSat, which combines image processing<\/a> and machine learning algorithms to extract information from every pixel about thousands of sandy beaches<\/a> along the Pacific rim.\n<\/p>\n “The tool automatically maps the position of the interface between the sand and water. Doing this over multiple images and beaches, and correcting for the tide, we can discover changes in the coastline over a large temporal and spatial scale and how this correlates with ENSO cycles,” says Dr. Kilian Vos, lead author of the study from the Water Research Laboratory.\n<\/p>\n \n Science & Nature Observing coastal changes from the cosmos<\/h2>\n
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