EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF LAGRANGIAN MIXING IN WEAKLY DISSIPATIVE TIDAL CHANNELS

Abstract

Estuaries are extremely dynamic environments, allowing wildlife to grow in a wide variety of ecosystems because of the interaction of masses of water with different characteristics. In particular, coastal bays and estuaries are characterized by flows driven by hydraulic unbalance such as baroclinic pressure gradients, river inflows and wind stresses, and tidal waves. Here, following a reductionist approach, we examine dispersion processes in a physical model of a tidal channel bounded by an inlet mouth, with tides as the dominant forcing. The presence of a tidal inlet can generate macro-vortices that during a tidal cycle may influence the momentum and mass transport on relatively large distances (Awaji et al. (1980), Awaji (1982), Branyon et al. (2022)). Moreover, tides tend to produce non-monotonic particle velocity correlation leading to possible particle looping trajectories that also reflect on a looping character of the Lagrangian integral time scales, differently from the classical statistically steady or homogeneous turbulence (Enrile et al. (2019)). Our goal is to examine the dispersion regimes by means of two-dimensional velocity measurements at the free surface reproduced in a large-scale physical model as a starting point for Lagrangian analysis. We show how the presence of a tidal inlet generates complex flow patterns depending on the character of the forcing tides. Furthermore, the mixed nature of tides may be crucial to dispersion processes, as it enhances the ability of the flow to transport mass in the direction of the main flow.