If one calculates in this way the sediment transport in all points of a coastal profile and integrates the found values over the breaker zone one gets the total transport along the coast. This is quite a lot of work, therefore formulas have been developed to assess the total load directly. Analysing the above procedure leads to the conclusion that the major factors in the computation are the longshore velocity, the wave height and the period. As was indicated earlier, the longshore velocity also mainly depends on wave height and period. The fact that along a coast longshore transport exists does not necessarily lead to coastal erosion or accretion.
Erosion depends only on the gradient in the longshore sediment transport.