Modeling the Transition to High Sediment Concentrations as a Response to Channel Deepening in the Ems River Estuary

Many estuaries are strongly modified by human interventions, including substantive channel deepening. In the Ems River Estuary (Germany and Netherlands), channel deepening between the 1960s and early 2000s coincided with an increase in the maximum near-bed suspended sediment concentration from moderate (∼1 kg/m ³ ) to high (>10...

A Regime Shift From Low to High Sediment Concentrations in a Tide-Dominated Estuary

Many estuaries are strongly deepened to improve navigation, with sometimes large and poorly understood consequences to suspended sediment dynamics. To improve understanding of such large changes, we study the Ems River Estuary, where a regime shift from low to high sediment concentrations was observed after deepening. The aim of this study is...

Can the Scheldt River Estuary become hyperturbid?: A model analysis of suspended sediment concentrations and transport in response to channel deepening

We investigate the hypothesis by Winterwerp and Wang (Ocean Dyn 63:1279–1292, 2013) that channel deepening in the Scheldt River Estuary could lead to a large increase in suspended sediment concentrations, with subsequent severe consequences to primary production and navigation. To this end, we use an idealised model to investigate the long...

Time Evolution of Estuarine Turbidity Maxima in Well-Mixed, Tidally Dominated Estuaries: The Role of Availability- and Erosion-Limited Conditions

Using an idealized width-averaged process-based model, the role of a mud pool on the bed and time-varying river discharge on the trapping of fine sediment is systematically investigated. For this purpose, a dynamically and physically motivated description of erodibility is presented, which relates the amount of sediment on the bed to the...

The iFlow modelling framework v2.4: A modular idealized process-based model for flow and transport in estuaries

The iFlow modelling framework is a width-averaged model for the systematic analysis of the water motion and sediment transport processes in estuaries and tidal rivers. The distinctive solution method, a mathematical perturbation method, used in the model allows for identification of the effect of individual physical processes on the water...