| dc.description.abstract | Seasonal morphological variations and effect of oceanographic processes such as erosion or accreation along beaches are important to understand the nature of the beach and the cyclic changes occurring during different seasons. Detailed investigations were taken up to analyze volumetric and morphologic variations at Yarada beach (Lat: 17 degrees 39.4 minutes N. and Long.: 83 degrees 16.3 minutes E.), which lies 8.5 kms south of Visakhapatnam port, in Andhra Pradesh, Central East Coast of India. Yarada beach is one of the most important areas, which has appreciable rate of erosion and deposition through out the study period. Five locations were selected at Yarada for beach profiling. The collected data clearly shows the specific zones of erosion and sand accretion during various periods. This study is based on the results of topographic profiles carried out on monthly basis, between May 2009 and May 2010. The volume variations of the sediments i.e. an account of accretion and erosion was estimated keeping the May 2009 profile as the base reference, over which the values of other seasons are compared and is presented in Table 9(iii). �A program to compute the volume of sand along beach Profiles� (Ganesan, P., 2006) was used for computation of volumes for the entire field data collected. The results of beach profiling at Yarada indicate that the beach was found to be accreting throughout the observation period at stations 2 and 5. But the comparison of beach profiles at stations 1 and 3 clearly shows the dominance of erosion, which probably could be because of the oceanographic processes. However at station 4, it is observed that 60 percent of the study period, the beach is accreting and the remaining 40 percent, the beach is eroding, probably because of dredging activities by Gangavaram Port Trust, just north of station 4, for their proposed new Jetty | |
