Weather-Induced Transport through a Tidal Channel Calibrated by an Unmanned Boat

Abstract

AbstractAn unmanned surface vehicle (USV) was designed and constructed to operate continuously for covering both flood and ebb and preferably a complete tidal cycle (e.g., ~24 h) to measure the vertical profiles of horizontal flow velocity. It was applied in a tidal channel at Port Fourchon, Louisiana. A bottom-mounted ADCP was deployed for 515 days. The first EOF mode of the velocity profiles showed a barotropic type of flow that explained more than 98.2% of the variability. The second mode showed a typical estuarine flow with two layers, which explained 0.47% of the variability. Using a linear regression of the total transport from the USV with the vertically averaged velocity from the bottom-mounted ADCP, with an R-squared value of 98%, the total along-channel transport throughout the deployment was calculated. A low-pass filtering of the transport allowed for examining the impact of 76 events with cold, warm, or combined cold–warm fronts passing the area. The top seven most severe events were discussed, as their associated transports obviously stood out in the time series, indicating the importance of weather. It is shown that large-scale weather systems with frontal lines of ~1500–3000-km horizontal length scale control the subtidal transport in the area. Cold (warm) fronts tend to generate outward (inward) transports, followed by a rebound. The maximum coherence between the atmospheric forcing and the ocean response reached ~71%–84%, which occurred at about a frequency f of ~0.29 cycle per day or T of ~3.4 days in the period, consistent with the atmospheric frontal return periods (~3–7 days).