Shorelines and beach width time series for three beaches of Mar del Plata (1986-2021) acquired from satellite imagery

Abstract

This repository contains the data used to evaluate the performance of a beach nourishment project in three bays of Mar del Plata, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The project was carried out by the Belgian company Dredging International between 1998 and 1999. A total of 2,480,000 m3 of sediments were dredged from the mouth of the local port and deposited on the Playa Grande, Varese and Bristol beaches. CoastSat 2.0 toolkit (https://github.com/kvos/CoastSat), an open-source Python software for shoreline detection was utilized. The toolkit allows users to acquire time series of shoreline positions for any coastal area using available satellite imagery from the Google Earth Engine platform. In this case, it was used with data from the Landsat missions L5 (1986–2012), L7 (1999–2021), L8 (2013–2021), and the Sentinel mission S2 (2015–2021). Top-of-Atmosphere reflectance images from the Landsat missions with a resolution of 30 m and a revisit time of 16 days (Tier 1) were utilized, along with images from the Sentinel 2 mission with a resolution of 10 m and a revisit time of 5 days (Level-1C). Additionally, the toolkit employed spatial resolution enhancement techniques over Landsat images to map the position of the shoreline with an accuracy of ~10 m. In this repository, CoastSat-detected shorelines can be accessed along with the normal to shore transects from which the beach width time series were obtained to analyze beach response to nourishment. Tide-corrected beach width time series are also provided.