Junbiao Tu, a Daidu Fan,a* Feixiang Sun, a Alexis Kaminski, b William Smythc*
a State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
b Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA
c College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA
Abstract:
This study presents field observations of fluid mud and the flow instabilities that result from the interaction between mud-induced density stratification and current shear. Data collected by ship-borne and bottom-mounted instruments in a hyperturbid estuarine tidal channel reveal the details of turbulent sheared layers in the fluid mud which persists throughout the tidal cycle. Shear instabilities form during periods of intense shear and strong mud-induced stratification, particularly with gradient Richardson number smaller than or fluctuating around the critical value of 0.25. Turbulent mixing plays a significant role in the vertical entrainment of fine sediment over the tidal cycle.The vertical extent of the billows identified seen in the acoustic images is the basis for two useful parameterizations. First, the aspect ratio (billow height/wavelength) is indicative of the initial Richardson number that characterizes the shear flow from which the billows grew. Second, we describe a scaling for the turbulent dissipation rate ε that holds for both observed and simulated K-H billows. Estimates for the present observations imply, however, that billows growing on a lutocline obey an altered scaling whose origin remains to be explained.
Full Article:https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/phoc/52/10/JPO-D-21-0230.1.xml
