Data from: Sixteen years of bathymetry and waves at San Diego Beaches

Sustained, quantitative observations of nearshore waves and sand levels
are essential for testing beach evolution models, but comprehensive
datasets are relatively rare. We document beach profiles and concurrent
waves monitored at three southern California beaches during 2001-2016. The
beaches include offshore reefs, lagoon mouths, hard substrates, and cobble
and sandy (medium-grained) sediments. The data span two energetic El Niño
winters and four beach nourishments. Quarterly surveys of 165 total
cross-shore transects (all sites) at 100m alongshore spacing were made
from the backbeach to 8m depth. Monthly surveys of the subaerial beach
were obtained at alongshore-oriented transects. The resulting dataset
consists of (1) raw sand elevation data, (2) gridded elevations, (3)
interpolated elevation maps with error estimates, (4) beach widths,
subaerial and total sand volumes, (5) locations of hard substrate and
beach nourishments, (6) water levels from a NOAA tide gauge (7) wave
conditions from a buoy-driven regional wave model, and (8) time periods
and reaches with alongshore uniform bathymetry, suitable for testing
1-dimensional beach profile change models.