Seasonal variation of tidal prism and energy in the Changjiang River estuary: a numerical study -- Journal of Oceanology and Limnology,2016,34(1):219-230

	Cite this paper:
	ZHANG Min, Ian Howard TOWNEND, CAI Huayang, ZHOU Yunxuan. Seasonal variation of tidal prism and energy in the Changjiang River estuary: a numerical study[J]. Journal of Oceanology and Limnology, 2016, 34(1): 219-230

Seasonal variation of tidal prism and energy in the Changjiang River estuary: a numerical study

ZHANG Min¹, Ian Howard TOWNEND², CAI Huayang³, ZHOU Yunxuan¹

1 State Key Laboratory of Estuarine and Coastal Research, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China;
2 Ocean and Earth Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK;
3 Department of Water Management, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Stevinweg 1, P. O. Box 5048, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands

Abstract:

Tidal rivers are intrinsically complex because tidal propagation is infl uenced by river discharge. This study aims to examine the seasonal variation of tidal prism and energy variance in the tidal river of the Changjiang (Yangtze) River estuary in China. In order to quantify the behaviour of river and tide, we use numerical modelling that has been validated using measured data. We conduct our analysis by quantifying the discharge and energy variance in separate components for both the river and the tide, during wet and dry seasons. We note various defi nitions of tidal prism and explore the diff erence between tidal discharge on the fl ood and ebb and tidal storage volume. The results show that the river discharge attenuates the tidal motion and reduces the tidal fl ood discharge but the tidal storage volume is approximately constant with diff erent riverine discharge since part of the fresh water discharge is intercepted and captured in the estuary due to the backwater eff ect. It appears that the tidal discharge adjusts according to the variation of river discharge to keep a constant tidal storage volume. An analysis of the hydraulics shows that the transition from tidal dominance (at the mouth) to river dominance (upstream) depends on the location of tidal current reversal which varies from wet season to dry season. Duringthe wet season, the Changjiang River estuary is totally dominated by energy from fresh water discharge.

Received: 2014-11-06 Revised: 2015-01-12

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