Non-hydrostatic Numerical Study of Hyperpycnal River Plumes on Sloping Continental Shelves
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Tseng, Chien-Yung
Abstract
A three-dimensional high-resolution nonhydrostatic coastal model, SUNTANS, is used to study the dynamics and structure of turbidity currents on sloping continental shelves with an idealized domain setup (Chen et al. 2013). To focus on the plunging region, the grid resolution is refined near the river mouth. The sediment concentration is specified as 50 g at the river inflow with 2 m inflow velocity to simulate the real mountainous river systems during different flood events. The model derived vertical velocity profiles and entrainment rates are consistent with the prior laboratory experiments. Compared with the hydrostatic modeling, our results show that the nonhydrostatic effect is especially important in the plunging region, while it is insignificant in the body region. We also apply three different slopes of the continental shelves in the simulation to understand how the slope change will affect plunging dynamics of the turbidity current. Moreover, the entrainment rate near the plunging region is examined with different slopes and the analysis of energy budget is conducted to investigate the spatial and temporal evolution of kinetic and potential energy associated with plunging.
Subjects
hyperpycnal plume
SUNTANS coastal ocean model
nonhydrostatic
plunging
entrainment
energy budget
Type
thesis
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