On December 22nd, Floris de Wit, employee at Svašek Hydraulics, successfully defended his PhD, titled “Wave shape prediction in complex coastal systems” at Delft University of Technology.

His work focussed on measuring, predicting, and modelling the nonlinear wave shape in complex coastal systems with the eventual goal to improve wave-induced sediment transport. Measurements at the Ameland Inlet were obtained to characterize the spatial evolution of the wave shape. Subsequently, a relationship was found between the non-linear wave shape and the bound wave height. Eventually, wave model SWAN was extended with an evolution equation for the bound energy, which allows for the prediction of the wave shape with spectral wave models.