Abstract
Abstract. The Huangmaohai estuary (HE) is a funnel-shaped microtidal estuary in the
west of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in southern China. Since China reformed
and opened up in 1978, extensive human activities have occurred and greatly
changed the estuary's topography and modified its hydrodynamics. In this
study, we examined the morphological evolution by analyzing remote sensing
data with ArcGIS tools and studied the responses of hydrodynamics to the
changes in topography from 1977 to 2010 by using the Delft3D model. We took
the changes in estuarine circulation during neap tides in dry seasons as an
example. The results show that human reclamation caused a narrowing of the
estuary, and channel dredging deepened the estuary. These human activities
changed both the longitudinal and lateral estuarine circulations. The
longitudinal circulation was observed to increase with the deepening and
narrowing of the estuary. The lateral circulation experienced changes in
both the magnitude and pattern. The momentum balance analysis shows that
when the depth and width changed simultaneously, the longitudinal estuarine
circulation was modulated by both the channel deepening and width reduction,
in which the friction, pressure gradient force, and advection terms were
altered. The analysis of the longitudinal vortex dynamics indicates that the
changes in the vertical shear of the longitudinal flow, lateral salinity
gradient, and vertical mixing were responsible for the change in the lateral
circulation. The changes in water depth are the dominant factors affecting
lateral circulation intensity. This study has implications for sediment
transport and morphological evolution in estuaries heavily impacted by human
interventions.
Funder
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Subject
Cell Biology,Developmental Biology,Embryology,Anatomy
Cited by
9 articles.
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