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The Concept
Video
Metric Systems™
is the only service that gives you continuous, quantitative information on shoreline
migration and beach erosion processes for managing your coastal resources.
Please
follow
this link for a workshop slide show on ABMS
technology.
Coastal zone managers
and engineers are faced with difficult and complex choices in deciding how best to reduce
property damage when storms strike and how to maintain the economic vitality of our
recreational shorelines. One of the problems they face is errors and uncertainties in the
information available to them on the processes that cause erosion of our beaches and the
results of those processes. This problem is so important that the National Research
Council (NRC) has recommended that better ways must be found to produce quantitative
information for monitoring the causes and progress of shoreline erosion.
With Video Metric Systems™ we’ve taken the NRC recommendation seriously.
Using the Argus Beach Monitoring Station (ABMS), we can give you the quantitative
information you want with the accuracy you need for managing your coastal resources.
Our
service produces numeric and graphical data products (see Data
Products and Services) using state-of-the-art digital video image processing and
photogrammetric techniques. Video-based monitoring lets us collect data continuously at
low cost and produce spatial and time series analyses (see below) of shoreline processes over a wide
range of averaging intervals.
The ABMS technology is the only solution that can provide
information on both outcomes and events (i.e., what happened) and processes
(i.e., why did something happen). In the same way that a weather satellite
in geostationary orbit continuously looks down on a part of the earth, the
cameras of an ABMS provide continuous imagery over several
kilometers of shoreline. An appropriate analogy for an ABMS is to
think of it as a "micro-satellite" in a geostationary orbit over a
beach. Through sophisticated camera models and image processing techniques,
ABMS images are merged and rectified to present a "satellite-eye"
view of the coastal zone. In the same way that meteorological features can
be located and tracked over time by a weather satellite, the ABMS data
yield continuous information on beach characteristics and wave conditions,
such as shoreline location, beach area, sand bar development and movement,
beach sand and volume changes, and wave patterns. Using advanced analysis
techniques the ABMS data can be used to measure wave run-up, wave energy,
intertidal beach profiles, characteristics of the swash zone, offshore
bathymetry, and other important processes and features of the nearshore.
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