VESSEL WAKE INDUCED DYNAMICS IN A SHALLOW-BAY ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

Ship wakes generated by large deep-draft vessels as well as those generated by smaller barges have the potential to cause significant compounding erosion and sedi-mentation issues, especially along high-traffic waterways. Yet, long-term in situ measurements of the actual hydro-dynamics initiated by ship wakes are rare. These data, however, are needed to optimize the design of erosion mitigation structures, to plan dredging efforts, to validate numerical modeling efforts, and to establish a basis from which the erosion and sedimentation potential of projected ship traffic can be estimated. This study is intended to help close some of these existing knowledge gaps through detailed analyses of measured velocity, water free-surface elevation change, and suspended sediment concentration caused by wind waves and ship wakes in the shallow-bay environment of Galveston Bay, Texas (GBT). In addition, numerical modeling efforts are being presented using the Boussinesq-type wave model FUNWAVE-TVD (Shi et al., 2012) to simulate individual vessel wake hydrodynamics and sediment-related dynamics and interactions with the local bathymetry and wetland edges based on the collected field data.