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Research Projects
High-resolution, nonhydrostatic simulations of a macrotidal estuary
PhD Student: Bing Wang
This project seeks to simulate the formation of
surface coherent structures with the aim of understanding whether they can be
used to remotely infer bottom bedforms or stratification. While the ultimate goal is to perform simulations of the Snohomish River Estuary in Washington
with O(10 cm) resolution to simulate coherent structures using SUNTANS,
our present simulations employ resolutions of O(5 m) (see Figure 1)
in order to understand
the hydrodynamics of the estuary in the presence of complex topography and wetting and drying. With such high resolution comes a host of modeling difficulties, most notably a high sensitivity to bottom bathymetry, as shown in Figure 2. This in turn has a pronounced effect on the salinity dynamics (Figure 3).
Figure 1: Unstructured grid of the computational domain. For clarity, only cell
centers (Voronoi points) are shown in the left and upper-right panels, while cell edges are shown in the lower-right panel. This grid has roughly 2 million cells.
Figure 2: Intertidal mudflats exposed during LLW on (a) older, coarse bathymetry and (b) newer, refined bathymetry. Free-surface height (m above MLLW) is plotted on the wet areas. The dashed line in (a) indicates where the older, coarse bathymetry survey data ends.
Figure 3: Near-surface salinity field at different stages of a strong ebb tide. Legend: dry areas (dark red), flow direction (arrows). The color scale from 5 to 35 psu is chosen for the best illustration on the salinity gradient.
This project is funded by a MURI grant from the ONR
Coastal Geosciences and Physical Oceanography programs. Bing is also
supported by the Stanford Graduate Fellowship Program.
For more information please visit Bing's web page.
Related publications:
B. Wang, O. B. Fringer, S. N. Giddings, and D. A. Fong, 2008, "High-resolution simulations of a macrotidal estuary using SUNTANS", Ocean Modelling, 26, 60-85, doi:10.1016/j.ocemod.2008.08.006.
Wang, B., and O. B. Fringer, 2008, "Nonhydrostatic effects in high-resolution estuarine simulations", Seventh International Workshop on Unstructured Grid Numerical Modelling of Coastal, Shelf and Ocean Flows, Halifax.
Wang, B., and O. B. Fringer, 2008, "High-resolution simulations of a salinity front interacting with complex geometry and intertidal mudflats", AGU Ocean Sciences Mtng., Orlando (invited).
B. Wang and O. B. Fringer, 2007, "Modeling the dynamics of the Snohomish River Estuary with a finite volume, unstructured-grid parallel coastal ocean simulator", Proceedings of the fifth international symposium on environmental hydraulics.
B. Wang, O. B. Fringer and M. Gerritsen, 2007, "Numerical techniques in a parallel, unstructured-grid, finite-volume coastal ocean simulation tool", Ninth U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics (invited).
B. Wang, O. B. Fringer, and R. L. Street, 2006, "Application of an unstructured-grid, finite-volume parallel coastal ocean simulator to the Snohomish River Estuary", Proceedings of the fifth international workshop on unstructured mesh numerical modelling of coastal, shelf and ocean flows.
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