George P. Schramkowski

Salt Dynamics in Well-Mixed Estuaries: Importance of Advection by Tides

AbstractUnderstanding salt dynamics is important to adequately model salt intrusion, baroclinic forcing, and sediment transport. In this paper, the importance of the residual salt transport due to tidal advection in well-mixed tidal estuaries is studied. The water motion is resolved in a consistent way with a width-averaged analytical model, coupled to an advection–diffusion equation describing the salt dynamics. The residual salt balance obtained from the coupled model shows that the seaward salt transport driven by river discharge is balanced by the landward salt transport due to tidal advection and horizontal diffusion. It is found that the tidal advection behaves as a diffusion process, and this contribution is named tidal advective diffusion. The horizontal diffusion parameterizes processes not explicitly resolved in the model and is called the prescribed diffusion. The tidal advective diffusion results from the correlation between the tidal velocity and salinity and can be explicitly calculated with...

The effect of geometry and tidal forcing on hydrodynamics and net sediment transport in semi-enclosed tidal basins

A new depth-averaged exploratory model has been developed to investigate the hydrodynamics and the tidally averaged sediment transport in a semi-enclosed tidal basin. This model comprises the two-dimensional (2DH) dynamics in a tidal basin that consists of a channel of arbitrary length, flanked by tidal flats, in which the water motion is being driven by an asymmetric tidal forcing at the seaward side. The equations are discretized in space by means of the finite element method and solved in the frequency domain. In this study, the lateral variations of the tidal asymmetry and the tidally averaged sediment transport are analyzed, as well as their sensitivity to changes in basin geometry and external overtides. The Coriolis force is taken into account. It is found that the length of the tidal basin and, to a lesser extent, the tidal flat area and the convergence length determine the behaviour of the tidally averaged velocity and the overtides and consequently control the strength and the direction of the tidally averaged sediment transport. Furthermore, the externally prescribed overtides can have a major influence on tidal asymmetry in the basin, depending on their amplitude and phase. Finally, for sufficiently wide tidal basins, the Coriolis force generates significant lateral dynamics.

Time Evolution of Estuarine Turbidity Maxima in Well-Mixed, Tidally Dominated Estuaries: The Role of Availability- and Erosion-Limited Conditions

Using an idealized width-averaged process-based model, the role of a mud pool on the bed and time-varying river discharge on the trapping of fine sediment is systematically investigated. For this purpose, a dynamically and physically motivated description of erodibility is presented, which relates the amount of sediment on the bed to the suspended sediment concentration (SSC). We can distinguish between two states: in the availability-limited state, the SSC is limited by the amount of erodible sediment at the bed. Over time, under constant forcing conditions, the estuary evolves to morphodynamic equilibrium. In the erosion-limited state, there is an abundant amount of sediment at the bed so that sediment pickup occurs at the maximum possible rate. The SSC is then limited by the local hydrodynamic conditions. In this state, the estuary keeps importing sediment, forming an erodible bottom pool that grows in time. These two states can be used to explain the response of an estuary to changing river discharge. Under availability-limited conditions, periods of high river discharge push estuarine turbidity maxima (ETMs) downstream, while drier periods allow ETMs to move upstream. However, when the estuary is in an erosion-limited state during low river discharge, a bottom pool is formed. When the discharge then increases, it takes time to deplete this pool, so that an ETM located over a bottom pool moves with a significant time lag relative to changes in the river discharge. Good qualitative agreement is found between model results and observations in the Scheldt Estuary of surface SSC using a representative year of discharge conditions.