Control of estuarine sediment dynamics by interactions between currents and waves at several scales

Abstract

The effect of interactions between continuous (tidal currents) and intermittent (waves) processes on sediment dynamics and transport is addressed by presenting detailed field measurements of waves, boundary-layer currents and suspended sediment from an estuarine channel and an adjacent intertidal sandflat in Manukau Harbour, New Zealand. The aim is to determine in what ways it is necessary to couple waves and currents in numerical models, and thereby put limits on the fundamental structure of process-based estuarine sediment transport models. Waves were important on the intertidal flat: turbidity switched on and off with the appearance and disappearance of waves; wave groups dominated entrainment of bed sediment; a wave-current boundary-layer model explained measured bed shear stress and hydraulic roughness; and the measured near-bed time-averaged suspended-sediment concentration was mostly well predicted by a pure-wave model. Both the waves themselves and wave-related processes varied markedly over the tidal cycle. The variation in the former (principally changes in wave height) was related to changes in fetch caused by the harbour-wide emergence and submergence of intertidal regions. The variation in the latter was related to changes in water depth relative to the wavelength of the waves, which controlled the penetration to the bed of wave-orbital currents. In addition to the variation over the tidal cycle in the ‘intensity’ of wave processes, there was also a change in ‘kind’, which occurred with the arrival at the measurement site of the ‘turbid fringe’, which is the narrow, highly turbid edge of the estuarine water body. The relationship between suspended-sediment concentration and wave-orbital velocity in the turbid fringe was radically different to the relationship in the estuarine water body proper, which suggests a change in dynamics, perhaps related to breaking waves. A ‘hybrid’ modelling approach is required, i.e. one that treats discrete events but resolves tidal-cycle-scale variation within the event. There is a need to resolve the variation in the wave train over the tidal cycle and the penetration to the bed of wave-orbital motions, both of which could only be done adequately within an estuary tidal model. In contrast to the situation on the intertidal flat where waves intermittently entrained sediment, sediment transport in the channel was continuous, driven by tidal currents. To predict sediment flux in the channel we need to know the upstream sediment-transporting capacity of the flow (including that contributed by waves), the character of the bed sediment, and the sediment-settling time scale. These factors confounded even the simplest notion of flood and ebb dominance, which frequently has been applied to understand estuarine morphodynamics.