Oceanography in the public interest: Tales from raglan

Unitec and staff members of ASR Limited have collaborated on a series of projects in and around Raglan, New Zealand. These studies have been performed with limite d outside funding, i.e. none of these studies were performed for commercial purposes, but rather were motivated out of our personal interest in understanding the Whaingaroa marine environment and a desire to assist the local community on matter related to the harbour and coast. A series of studies have been conducted including: 1) mapping the evolution of a large offshore sand bank, 2) developing an imagery database depicting the morphology of the ebb tidal shoal, 3) correlating measured wave records to high scoring waves during a surfing competition and 4) a complete hydrodynamic model of Whaingaroa Harbour. This paper provides an overview of the project, the methodologies of the individual investigations and briefly summarises their results. The information gained from this work has been shared with the public and community groups such as Raglan Harbour Care as well as other engineers, scientists and the local council to assist in planning and decision making.