Research Summaries

Back Linking the Surf Zone and Inner Shelf: Cross Transport Mechanisms

Fiscal Year 2009
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Oceanography
Investigator(s) MacMahan, James H.
Sponsor Office of Naval Research (Navy)
Summary We, MacMahan and Reniers, propose to collaboratively examine the cross-shore exchange between the surfzone and the inner shelf on a natural sandy beach with persistent rip currents. The proposed work includes a 4-week long field experiment located at Sand City, Monterey Bay, CA, to be held in the spring of 2009. Repetitive cluster drifter deployments are planned to measure the Lagrangian mean velocities and dispersion of the rip current jet outside of the surfzone. In addition, high resolution ADCP velocity measurements will be used to observe the vertical structure and temporal fluctuations of the Eulerian circulation flow field from 2 m water depth to,13 m water depth, thus spanning the transition from the surf zone to the inner shelf. The observations will be evaluated with a well-established Navy-used nearshore numerical model, Delft3D, in full-3D mode including wave-current interaction and wave group forcing. The proposed technical approach including Lagrangian (drifters), Eulerian (ADCPs) and numerical tools, allows, for the first time, to evaluate the cross-shore exchange between surfzone and inner shelf on a rip-change.
Keywords
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Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal