Flow Regimes and Adjustment to Wind‐Driven Motions in Lake Pontchartrain Estuary: A Modeling Experiment Using FVCOM

Abstract

AbstractLake Pontchartrain is a brackish estuary and restricted lagoon in the microtidal northern Gulf of Mexico. Using a validated Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM), we study the flow regimes and wind‐driven adjustment of circulation in this system. It is found that tidal currents are only significant in the eastern end near the open boundary. Local wind inside the estuary is important in driving the circulation including coastal currents. Numerical experiments confirm that the subtidal wind‐driven flow is in a quasi‐steady balance between wind stress and surface slope. Our results show that the adjustment of surface level inside the system to a sudden change in wind is a transient seiche, which dissipates within two to three cycles, each lasting ~3 hr. After the oscillations, the system reaches a new equilibrium. We show in theory that this is a damped oscillation and as wind changes, an adjustment to a new equilibrium goes much faster than a complete tidal period. This leads to the quasi steady state balance of subtidal wind‐driven flows with essentially no phase lag with wind even though wind changes with time continuously. Wind‐induced circulation behaves differently from the Csanady model with Earth rotation but similar to the prismatic lake model of Engelund without Coriolis: The coastal and shallow regions tend to have flows in the direction of wind, while the interior and deeper waters have return flows against the wind especially in bottom layer. The surface flow may not be in the direction of wind, while the bottom usually has broad and uniform counter wind flows.