Lab Information
Coastal and estuarine environments experience complex hydrodynamics and sediment transport influenced by terrestrial, marine, and atmospheric forcing. These processes drive morphological changes that characterize each environment. Scientists have been investigating these environments to fully understand the coastal and estuarine hydrodynamics but are still not fully understood.
Humans have altered coastal and estuarine environments for freshwater supply, settlement, and transport. They have built large-coastal projects (e.g., dams, breakwaters), reclaimed land, and dredged riverbeds. Consequently, these projects modified the coastal and estuarine hydrodynamics and sometimes caused an irreversible morphologic change.
The Coastal and Estuarine Morphodynamics Laboratory focuses on understanding the hydrodynamics and sediment transport in coastal and estuarine environments. Nowadays, the laboratory expanded its scope in investigating the impact of large-scale coastal projects on the change in hydrodynamics and the corresponding response of the environment. For example, the laboratory is one of the leading front-liners that quantifies the role of an estuarine dam such as in Nakdong Estuary, Yongsan Estuary, and Geum Estuary. Through this, our laboratory can recommend efficient ways of managing inevitable coastal projects to minimize the damage to the environment.
We utilize Real-Time Kinematic – Global Positioning System (RTK-GPS) and altimeters, which collect survey data, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), which captures aerial images that will be visualized using Geographic Information System (GIS) software (ArcGIS), to analyze morphological changes. To explain the results, we deploy field equipment such as Aquadopp, RBR conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD), and OBS that enables us to characterize both the channel flow and quantify sediment suspension concentration (SSC). Finally, to supplement these results, we simulate numerical models to have a holistic understanding of the spatiotemporal variation of sediment transport.