The export power cables of offshore wind farms join the onshore grid by crossing a landing area, usually a beach, where they are buried under the sand (burial). This burial must remain effective throughout the life of the farm, several decades, while the beach is constantly evolving over storms and seasons and, in the longer term, under the effect of rising sea levels and changing wave climates. Erosion that exposes the cable exposes it to degradation and can require costly work, and conversely accretion can cause the cables to overheat. Knowing the topography, bathymetry and morphodynamics of these beaches, and anticipating the evolution of the coastline, is therefore necessary to size and choose the type of burial and plan the monitoring of landfalls.
This knowledge is now based on empirical and numerical modelling of the morphological evolution of beaches. These models need historical observations in order to calibrate them at study sites. On the other hand, in situ surveys (topography, bathymetry) are expensive, often spaced out in time and incomplete. Today, satellite data offer an increasingly credible alternative: coastlines and intertidal topography extracted from Sentinel-2 optical images (e.g. with the CoastSat tool, Vos et al., 2019), height profiles from the ICESat-2 space lidar, or wide-swath altimetry from the SWOT mission, launched at the end of 2022, whose contribution to the coastal zone is beginning to be evaluated (Turki et al., 2025). However, their accuracy, spatial and temporal resolutions, and their ability to describe landing ranges remain to be evaluated.
The proposed internship is part of the 2C MORE (France Energies Marines) project, which aims to assess the impacts of climate change on offshore wind power, and one part of which focuses on the evolution of the coastline in the area of cable landfalls. The internship will assess the extent to which satellite data can complement, or even replace, in situ surveys, and how they can feed models of the evolution of the coastline under climate change.
The main missions entrusted during this internship are:
Quality scientific co-supervision will be offered by France Energies Marines and the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, as well as the possibility of contributing to scientific publications or communications.
Final year of engineering school or master 2 with a specialization in oceanography, applied mathematics, coastal management, meteorology or equivalent
Knowledge of coastal morphodynamics, a first experience with tools such as Google Earth Engine or CoastSat, an interest in climate issues and MRE
In accordance with regulations, all other things being equal, priority will be given to people with disabilities.
