SEMINAR: amp student seminar

[areniers@rsmas.miami.edu]

Good morning,

this is a reminder of the invitation for the upcoming seminar at noon
today, 29 april, by Zhixuan Feng in the AMP seminar room. Abstract and
title below.

best regards,

Ad Reniers

Title: Cold-front-induced Flushing of the Louisiana Bays

Abstract: The water level variations in three Louisiana bay systems west
of the Mississippi Delta are used to calculate the cold-front-induced
volume exchange rates. Twenty-nine cold fronts are identified from
weather maps, between September 2006 and April 2007. Cold front passages
are found to cause water to be flushed out of the bays, and the exchange
rates vary greatly. Due to the differences in water body area and basin
geometry, exchange rates in different bays are also very different, with
Atchafalaya-Vermilion Bay one order of magnitude higher than Barataria
Bay. Five largest flush-out events are found to correspond to migrating
cyclones with a frontal orientation perpendicular to the coastline,
suggesting that wind direction is one of the controlling factors in the
flushing rate and total volume transport. Both alongshore and
cross-shore winds may play important roles in the water exchange.
Furthermore, northwest winds appear to be the most effective wind
forcing in driving water level change. Strong cold fronts may flush more
than 40% of the bay waters out onto the continental shelf within a less
than 40-hour period. A one-dimensional analytical model, modified from
Garvine (1985), reveals that water level fluctuations induced by
cross-shore and alongshore winds of a cold front episode are in the same
order of magnitude (i.e., 10^-1 m), indicating that cross-shore wind and
alongshore wind play almost equally important roles in affecting the
subtidal water level variability inside the estuaries. The
model-predicted maximum and minimum water levels are coherent with winds
from southerly and northerly quadrants, respectively, which agree well
with observations.


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