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Estuarine Exchange Flow Quantified with Isohaline Coordinates: Contrasting Long and Short Estuaries Public Deposited

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  • Isohaline coordinate analysis is used to compare the exchange flow in two contrasting estuaries, the long (with respect to tidal excursion) Hudson River and the short Merrimack River, using validated numerical models. The isohaline analysis averages fluxes in salinity space rather than in physical space, yielding the isohaline exchange flow that incorporates both subtidal and tidal fluxes and precisely satisfies the Knudsen relation. The isohaline analysis can be consistently applied to both subtidally and tidally dominated estuaries. In the Hudson, the isohaline exchange flow is similar to results from the Eulerian analysis, and the conventional estuarine theory can be used to quantify the salt transport based on scaling with the baroclinic pressure gradient. In the Merrimack, the isohaline exchange flow is much larger than the Eulerian quantity, indicating the dominance of tidal salt flux. The exchange flow does not scale with the baroclinic pressure gradient but rather with tidal volume flux. This tidal exchange is driven by tidal pumping due to the jet–sink flow at the mouth constriction, leading to a linear dependence of exchange flow on tidal volume flux. Finally, a tidal conversion parameter Q[subfield in]/Q[subfield prism], measuring the fraction of tidal inflow Q[subfield prism] that is converted into net exchange Q[subfield in], is proposed to characterize the exchange processes among different systems. It is found that the length scale ratio between tidal excursion and salinity intrusion provides a characteristic to distinguish estuarine regimes.
  • This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the American Meteorological Society and can be found at: http://journals.ametsoc.org/loi/phoc.
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  • Chen, Shih-Nan, W. Rockwell Geyer, David K. Ralston, James A. Lerczak, 2012: Estuarine exchange flow quantified with isohaline coordinates: Contrasting long and short estuaries. Journal of Physical Oceanography, 42, 748–763. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JPO-D-11-086.1
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  • 42
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  • 5
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  • SNC is supported by a WHOI postdoctoral scholarship, a NSF Grant OCE-0926427, and a Taiwan National Science Council Grant NSC 100-2199-M-002-028. WRG is supported by NSF Grant OCE-0926427. JAL is supported by NSF Grant OCE-0452054.
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