Seasonal dynamics of circulation in Hooghly Estuary and its adjacent coastal oceans

Abstract

Hooghly is one of the major estuaries in Ganges, the largest and longest river in the Indian subcontinent. The Hooghly estuary is a coastal plain estuary lying approximately between 21°–23° N and 87°–89° E. We used a terrain following ocean model to study tide driven residual circulations, seasonal mean flow patterns and its energetics in the Hooghly estuary and adjacent coastal oceans on the north eastern continental shelf of India. The model is driven by tidal levels at open ocean end and winds at the air-sea interface. The sources of forcing fields for tides were from FES2012, winds from ECMWF. Harmonic analysis is carried out to compute the tidal and non-tidal components of currents and sea level from the model solutions. The de-tidal components were averaged for the entire period of simulation to describe residual and mean-seasonal circulations in the regions. We used tide-gauge, SARAL-ALTIKA along track sea level measurements to evaluate model solutions. Satellite measure Chla were used along with simulated currents to describe important features of the circulations in the region.