Abstract
The characteristics of morphological shapes, wave heights, tidal ranges and sediment sizes are observed and compared between intertidal beach and mudflat. The Mohang sand beach, southwest coast of Korea, is located just next to the large mudflat and has tidal range over 5 meters. Wave measurements are conducted at each entrance of the beach and mudflat as well as at the outside waters representing the incident waves to these different coastal environments. The morphological characteristics are also examined including the sediment size and the slope of the bathymetry, For the observation of morphological shapes, camera monitoring technique is used to measure the spatial information of intertidal bathymetry. The water lines moving on the intertidal flat/beach durinq a flood indicate depth contours between low and high water lines. The water lines extracted from the consecutive images are rectified to get the ground coordinates of each depth contours and integrated to provide three dimensional information of intertidal topography. The wave data show that sand beach is in the condition of severer wave forcing but tidal range is almost identical in both environment. The slope of the mudflat is much milder than the sand beach with finer sediment.