Modelling Salt Intrusion and Nitrate Concentrations in the Ythan Estuary

Abstract

A one-dimensional salt intrusion model is used to investigate the hydrography of the Ythan estuary, a small shallow macrotidal estuary in the north-east of Scotland. The model simulates the longitudinal distributions of water level, salinity and total oxidized nitrogen (TON) in the estuary. The model employs upstream differencing and the Smolarkiewicz anti-diffusion scheme to avoid the numerical difficulties typically encountered when modelling strong tidal flows using centred differences. The physical mechanisms driving the simulations are the tide at the entrance to the estuary and freshwater discharge at the head. The model was calibrated against measurements of water level made at three locations in the estuary, salinity observations made at a central platform and axial salinity distributions. At both spring and neap tides, the full range of salinity observed at the central platform was simulated. However, at the midway stage between springs and neaps, the simulated peak salinity was less than that observed. This was probably due to the sensitivity of the model to the digitisation of the estuarine bathymetry.The model successfully simulated salinity distributions for periods of high and low river flow, and was used to illustrate how TON concentrations fluctuated in response to variations in river flow. The potential implications of variations in the bathymetry of the estuary on salinity and nutrient distributions were predicted to be slight. However, the four fold increase in riverine TON concentrations that has occurred over the past 30 years was shown to increase TON distributions along the entire length of the estuary. The calculated estuary flushing time was strongly dependent on river flow and varied between 11–60h.