Response of tidal flow regime and sediment transport in North Malé Atoll, Maldives, to coastal modification and sea level rise

Rasheed, Shuaib; Warder, Simon C.; Plancherel, Yves; Piggott, Matthew D.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/os-17-319-2021

Articles | Volume 17, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/os-17-319-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/os-17-319-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 1

Research article

| Highlight paper

|

17 Feb 2021

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 17 Feb 2021

Response of tidal flow regime and sediment transport in North Malé Atoll, Maldives, to coastal modification and sea level rise

Shuaib Rasheed, Simon C. Warder, Yves Plancherel, and Matthew D. Piggott

Data sets

Sea level measured by tide gauges from global oceans – the Joint Archive for Sea Level holdings (NCEI Accession 0019568), Version 5.5 P. Caldwell, M. Merrifield, and P. Thompson https://doi.org/10.7289/V5V40S7W

Model code and software

Thetis coastal ocean model: discontinuous Galerkin discretization for the three-dimensional hydrostatic equations (https://github.com/thetisproject/thetis) T. Kärnä, S. C. Kramer, L. Mitchell, D. A. Ham, M. D. Piggott, and A. M. Baptista https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-4359-2018

Short summary

Environmental issues arising due to coastal modification and future sea level scenarios are a major environmental hazard facing the Maldives today. Here, we carry out high-resolution tidal modelling of a Maldivian atoll for the first time and show that coastal modification in the island scale is capable of driving large-scale change in the wider atoll basin in a short time, comparable to that of long-term sea level rise scenarios and on par with observations.