Abstract
Many tidal estuaries are composed of narrow constrictions and wide basins, forming a “strait-basin system”. A typical example of such a system is that of the Akashi Strait and Osaka Bay in the Seto Inland Sea, Japan. In this system, tidal currents in the straits are much stronger than those within the basins. Therefore the mass transport processes are advection rather than diffusion and governed by strongly non-linear effects. In order to reveal the flow and transport mechanism in the strongly non-linear effect, field observations have been conducted. The observations include flow-visualization experiments by the simultaneous use of several shipboard acoustic Doppler current profilers. In the strait-basin system, the tidal-jet from the strait generates a moving vortex-pair, which is smaller than the tidal excursion. This vortex-pair carries vorticity originally generated at the separation point in the strait far into the basin during each tidal cycle. The moving vortex replenishes the vorticity of the basin-wide residual circulation, which is larger than the tidal excursion. This residual circulation further acts on the trajectories of the moving vortices. Generation of moving vortices from a tidal-jet is not unique but common and essential phenomena in many strait-basin systems. These systems are filled with vortices.
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