Abstract
Major marine construction projects, resulting in the release of sediments, are subject to environmental assessment and other regulatory approval processes. An important tool used for this is the development of specialized numerical methods for these marine activities. An integrated set of numerical methods addresses four distinct topics: (1) The near-field release and mixing of suspended sediments into the water column (i.e., the initial dilution zone); (2) the transport of the suspended sediments under the influence of complex ocean currents in the far-field; (3) the settling of the transported suspended sediments onto the seabed; and (4) the potential for resuspension of the deposited sediments due to sporadic occurrences of unusually large near-bottom currents. A review of projects subjected to environmental assessment in the coastal waters of British Columbia, from the year 2006 to 2017, is presented to illustrate the numerical models being used and their ongoing development. Improvements include higher resolution model grids to better represent the near-field, the depiction of particle size dependent vertical settling rates and the computation of resuspension of initially deposited sediments, especially in relation to temporary subsea piles of sediments arising from trenching for marine pipelines. The ongoing challenges for this numerical modeling application area are also identified.
Highlights
In this paper, we present an overview of the development and applications of advanced numerical modeling of sediment transport and fate resulting from marine construction
Wind forcing is applied through the surface boundary condition and the stratified water properties within the model are determined from historical Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) conductivity temperature depth (CTD) water properties data sets
The sediments released from the trenching operation were derived for the case of two mechanical bucket dredges operated simultaneously from the center of the marine pipeline corridor moving in opposite directions
Summary
We present an overview of the development and applications of advanced numerical modeling of sediment transport and fate resulting from marine construction. This modeling is a useful tool to quantify the effects of these activities on the receiving environment. The modeling applications address a wide range of marine construction activities including: Dredging for the expansion of ports and harbors; disposal at sea of dredgates; trenching and backfilling for marine pipelines in shallow waters in approaching the coastline; and the removal and installation of underwater electrical cables. We present examples of the models for environmental assessment for port development and for construction of marine pipelines in the jurisdiction of British Columbia, Canada
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