Long period oscillations in the longshore current on a sandy, barred coast investigated with singular spectrum analysis

The presence of infragravity waves in nearshore regions can be sought in the records of both water levels and wave-driven longshore currents. For this reason, time series of such currents in close proximity to the shoreline were analysed using Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA). Simultaneously, the results obtained with this method were confronted with the output of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), which had previously been applied to this data. The records of longshore currents were collected on a daily basis during field experiments in the autumns of 2002 and 2003 with sampling rates of 3 Hz and 0.5 Hz. This produced a large data set that allowed for the use of an advanced signal processing technique, capable of extracting patterns characteristic of low-, medium- and high-frequency bands. It provided similar evidence to that produced by DWT for the existence of infragravity waves along a dissipative coast with multiple bars. The study also demonstrated the utility of SSA for studies on coastal hydrodynamics. It also showed up the better user-friendliness of DWT in terms of pattern extraction and interpretation. On the other hand, SSA demonstrated a higher precision of pattern extraction once the DWT output was known, which is a manifestation of the synergy of the two methods when applied jointly.