Salt transport regimes caused by tidal and subtidal processes in narrow estuaries

Abstract

The various subtidal and tidal transport processes each have a different sensitivity to changing forcing parameters (e.g., tides and river discharge) and geometry (depth or width). Hence, to understand how the salt intrusion and stratification in an estuary change with changing parameters, it is important to understand which mechanisms dominate the salt transport. However, there is currently no comprehensive theory that describes the relative importance of subtidal and tidal processes as a function of the estuarine parameters, such as depth, width, river run-off, or tides for general estuaries. This work contributes to such theory focusing on width-averaged processes.