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Introduction Alongshore currents drive changes of coastal morphology and also embody a potential threat for swimmer safety. This explains the interest of coastal managers and scientists in cost-efficient techniques to quantify alongshore flow patterns. Traditional in-situ methods like electro magnetic flowmeters are expensive, time-consuming, dangerous to deploy during rough wave conditions and lack synoptic coverage. Recently a new technique was developed which quantifies flow velocities from intra-wave video observations of the nearshore (Chickadel et al., 2003). This Optical Current Meter (OCM) was successfully tested against extensive field experiments at a swell-dominated, intermediate to reflective beach at Duck, NC (USA). In this paper, we investigate the applicability of the OCM at a dissipative beach at Noordwijk (the Netherlands), characterized by shorter waves and a mild beach slope. The Optical Current Meter (OCM) The OCM was developed at Oregon State University as part of the Argus video program (Holman et al., 1993). It is based on the analysis of short time series of image intensities, sampled from an alongshore array of pixels (cf.
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