Low-Crested Detached Breakwaters on a Micro-Tidal Beach to Actively Manage Norfolk’s Ocean View Shoreline

Ocean View Beach is an 11 km length of urban beach located in Norfolk, Virginia, USA, along the southern coast of the Chesapeake Bay. This area has been heavily developed for many decades, so that the sandy beach is backed by a mix of residential structures and commercial structures, hotels, and urban beach parks. The City of Norfolk has also actively managed and monitored the beach system for decades, using sand nourishment and coastal structures (combination of detached breakwaters and groins), including a collective shoreline length of approximately 4.5 km fronted by detached breakwaters (with gaps between breakwater fields). In this paper, the morphology of the Willoughby Spit vicinity at the western end of Ocean View, several years before and several years after the 2013 construction of seven breakwaters is evaluated in detail. A three-dimensional (3D) coastal sediment transport model (3DCSTM) modelling study used to design a 2020 breakwater field modification is described, including its calibration to observed shoreline and nearshore bathymetry along with multi-year post-construction performance projections.