Dear Colleagues,
We are organizing a special session (050) on "Dynamics of Estuarine Circulations and River Plumes: From Process Studies to Predictive Models" at the upcoming 2008 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Orlando, Florida.
We invite you to submit an abstract to our session and join us in Orlando. The session description is given below.
Ming Li.
050. Dynamics of Estuarine Circulations and River Plumes: From Process Studies to Predictive Models [P, C, F]
Organizers: Ming Li, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, mingli@hpl.umces.edu; Parker MacCready, University of Washington, parker@ocean.washington.edu
Estuaries and river plumes provide an important pathway of nutrients and carbon between the continent and ocean. Due to the complex geometry and inter-dependence of motions at different time and spatial scales, it is challenging to develop predictive hydrodynamic models that can be used to examine circulation dynamics, contaminant transport, water quality and ecosystem productivity in these coastal regions. However, exciting advances have recently been made in understanding estuarine and river plume processes and in developing the state-of-art numerical models. Observations have yielded new insights into circulation dynamics and mixing processes while numerical models have been validated against observational data and shown considerable hindcast capability. It is timely to discuss the recent progress, identify critical gaps in our current understanding and assess the predictive skills of estuarine and shelf models. We are particularly interested in contributions on:
(1) Observational and modeling studies which provide new insights into estuarine and river plume physics such as circulation dynamics and turbulent mixing.
(2) Development of novel numerical methods and physics parameterizations for use in estuaries and shelf seas.
(3) Application and validation of numerical models to estuaries and their adjacent shelves, and evaluation of the predictive skills.