Coastal Engineering Technical Note IV-20
September 1999
Sediment Budget Analysis System
(SBAS)
by Julie Dean Rosati and Nicholas C. Kraus
PURPOSE: The Coastal Engineering Technical Note (CETN) herein presents the Sediment
Budget Analysis System (SBAS), a PC-based method for calculating sediment budgets at single
or multiple inlets and at the adjacent beaches. The SBAS runs on the Windows 95, 98, and NT
platforms. This CETN is a companion to CETN-IV-15 (Revised September 1999) (Rosati and
Kraus 1999), which presents sediment budget theory and methodology, and CETN-IV-16 (Kraus
and Rosati 1998), which discusses uncertainty in sediment budgets.
BACKGROUND: Sediment budgets provide a conceptual and quantitative model of the
magnitudes and pathways of sediment transport at inlets and adjacent beaches for a given time
period. Sediment budgets give a framework for understanding complex inlet and coastal systems
and their responses to coastal engineering projects. Any convenient method, such as a
spreadsheet application, can be used to formulate and calculate a sediment budget. The SBAS is
a convenient method for formulating regional sediment budgets for coastal regions, including
inlets, because it is visually based, provides an integrated picture of the processes while
archiving detailed calculations within the system, and allows variations in the sediment budget to
be rapidly examined.
Capabilities of SBAS include the following:
Automatically generates and updates sediment budget equations as the user defines
computational cells and transport pathways with the SBAS toolbar menu.
Is visually based by color coding computational cells according to their individual budgets
(loss, gain, balance) and by showing transport paths with arrows.
Allows different sediment budgets for the same coastal reach to be copied and modified to
bracket seasonal, yearly, project-specific, and historical changes and to reflect uncertainty
and sensitivity testing.
Can accommodate different conceptual approaches in implementing a sediment budget.
Facilitates a regional approach and joining of independently prepared budgets on contiguous
sections of the coast by allowing an unlimited number of cells and transport pathways and
page scrolling left and right or up and down.
Allows user to track uncertainty and the sediment budget imbalance within each cell and
within the budget of all combined cells (the macrobudget).
Provides capability to define dependencies of one value upon another within the sediment
budget.
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