Connotea
CiteULike
del.ico.us
BibSonomyAbstract
Modeling the influence of wave-enhanced turbulence in a shallow tide- and wind-driven water column
Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.
Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.
The ability of one-dimensional hydrodynamic models to reproduce dissipation of turbulent kinetic energy and velocity profiles
for conditions of whitecapping waves in a shallow water, tide- and wind-forced environment was assessed. The models were forced
with the conditions experienced during a month-long field experiment in a shallow estuarine embayment, and the results were
compared with the observed dissipation and mean velocity profiles. Three turbulence models were assessed: the k-ω model and two k-l models, with different prescribed bilinear relationships for the turbulent length scale, l. The k-ω turbulence model was found to best replicate the measured decay of dissipation with depth with a surface roughness length,
z 0s = 1.3H s , and wave energy parameter, α = 60. The k-l model achieved equally as good reproduction of the observations as the k-ω model when the proportionality constant in the prescribed linear length scale relationship for the upper half of the water
column was modified from the traditionally employed von Karman's constant, 
= 0.4, to 0.25. The model results show that the whitecapping waves often supplied the dominant source of turbulent kinetic
energy over the majority of the water column in the shallow, tide- and wind-forced system.
Received 27 March 2007; accepted 2 November 2007; published 11 March 2008.
Citation: (2008), Modeling the influence of wave-enhanced turbulence in a shallow tide- and wind-driven water column, J. Geophys. Res., 113, C03009, doi:10.1029/2007JC004246.
Cited By