CORIE - Modeling ELCIRC/SELFE Benchmarks: River plume

Problem Statement
Large river plume (like Columbia's) is a major coastal feature in many parts of the world. The buoyant freshwater carries nutrients, sediments etc. into coastal ocean and therefore plays an important part in the coastal ecological system. Physically this is essentially a surface-dominated process. Previous studies (e.g., Garcia-Berdeal et al. 2002) are restricted to systems with mild bottom slope or with mild stratifications. Here we present results from ELCIRC and SELFE of a large river plume, and thus it's a very challenging problem, especially for terrain-following models. We welcome any results and comparison from those models. Benchmark set-up Domain: The domain is the Columbia River estuary and associated plume region. As a first step, we study the natural tendancy of the plume by turning off all external forcing (tides and wind), and only apply a steady freshwater discharge of 7000 m^3/s (long-term average of Columbia River). Domain discretization: We use 43 Z-levels in the ELCIRC run, and 54 SZ-levels in the SELFE run.Time: The two models were run for a total of 14 days.

ELCIRC run Input files

param.in Input parameters
hgrid.gr3 Horizontal grid
vgrid.in Vertical grid
salt.ic initial condition for salinity
temp.ic initial condition for temperature

SELFE run Input files

param.in for ELM Input parameters
param.in for upwind Input parameters
hgrid.gr3 Horizontal grid
vgrid.in Vertical grid
drag.gr3 bottom drag coefficients
interpol.gr3 interpolation mode input
xlsc.gr3 surface mixing length
diffmax.gr3 maximum diffusivity (used in GLS closure)
diffmin.gr3 minimum diffusivity (used in GLS closure)
salt.ic initial condition for salinity
temp.ic initial condition for temperature

Results
Surface plume at t=14 days. (a) SELFE with ELM transport; (b) ELCIRC; (c) SELFE with upwind transport.
Note: the results shown here were obtained with a slightly different version of the code, but you should be able to see qualitatively similar results from your own runs.

Discussion

References

I. Garcia-Berdeal, B. M. Hickey, and M. Kawase, "Influence of wind stress and ambient flow on a high discharge river plume.," J. Geophys. Res., vol. 107, pp. 3130, 2002.
Zhang, Y.-L. and Baptista, A.M. (submitted) "A semi-implicit Eulerian-Lagrangian finite-element model for cross-scale ocean circulation, with hybrid vertical coordinates", Int. J. Num. Fluids.