Study of suspended sediment dynamics in a temperate coastal lagoon: Ria de Aveiro (Portugal)

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 604-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Plecha ◽  
Ana Picado ◽  
Pedro Chambel-Leitão ◽  
João M. Dias ◽  
Nuno Vaz
2018 ◽  
Vol 85 ◽  
pp. 521-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Costa ◽  
Ana Picado ◽  
Nuno Vaz ◽  
Carlos Coelho ◽  
Luís Portela ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Nguyen Ngoc Tien ◽  
Dinh Van Uu ◽  
Nguyen Tho Sao ◽  
Do Huy Cuong ◽  
Nguyen Trung Thanh ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 727
Author(s):  
José Fortes Lopes ◽  
Carina Lurdes Lopes ◽  
João Miguel Dias

Extreme weather events (EWEs) represent meteorological hazards for coastal lagoon hydrodynamics, of which intensity and frequency are increasing over the last decades as a consequence of climate changes. The imbalances they generated should affect primarily vulnerable low-lying areas while potentially disturbing the physical balances (salt and water temperature) and, therefore, the ecosystem equilibrium. This study arises from the need to assess the impact of EWEs on the Ria de Aveiro, a lagoon situated in the Portuguese coastal area. Furthermore, it was considered that those events occur under the frame of a future sea-level rise, as predicted by several climate change scenarios. Two EWEs scenarios, a dry and an extremely wet early summer reflecting past situations and likely to occur in the future, were considered to assess the departure from the system baseline functioning. It was used as a biogeochemistry model that simulates the hydrodynamics, as well as the baseline physical and biogeochemistry state variables. The dry summer scenario, corresponding to a significant reduction in the river’s inflow, evidences a shift of the system to a situation under oceanic dominance characterized by colder and saltier water (~18 °C; 34 PSU) than the baseline while lowering the concentration of the nutrients and reducing the phytoplankton population to a low-level limit. Under a wet summer scenario, the lagoon shifted to a brackish and warmer situation (~21 °C, <15 PSU) in a time scale of some tidal periods, driven by the combining effect of the tidal transport and the river’s inflow. Phytoplankton patterns respond to variability on local and short-term scales that reflect physical conditions within the lagoon, inducing nutrient-supported growth. Overall, the results indicate that EWEs generate local and transient changes in physical conditions (namely salinity and water temperature) in response to the characteristic variability of the lagoon’s hydrodynamics associated with a tidal-dominated system. Therefore, in addition to the potential impact of changing physical conditions on the ecosystem, saline intrusion along the lagoon or the transfer of brackish water to the mouth of the system are the main consequences of EWEs, while the main biogeochemistry changes tend to remain moderate.


2014 ◽  
Vol 79 ◽  
pp. 509-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Unverricht ◽  
Thanh Cong Nguyen ◽  
Christoph Heinrich ◽  
Witold Szczuciński ◽  
Niko Lahajnar ◽  
...  

2008 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 299-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Stott ◽  
Anne‐marie Nuttall ◽  
Nick Eden ◽  
Katie Smith ◽  
Darren Maxwell

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 3421-3434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Costa ◽  
Daniela Anghileri ◽  
Peter Molnar

Abstract. We analyse the control of hydroclimatic factors on suspended sediment concentration (SSC) in Alpine catchments by differentiating among the potential contributions of erosion and suspended sediment transport driven by erosive rainfall, defined as liquid precipitation over snow-free surfaces, ice melt from glacierized areas, and snowmelt on hillslopes. We account for the potential impact of hydropower by intercepting sediment fluxes originated in areas diverted to hydropower reservoirs, and by considering the contribution of hydropower releases to SSC. We obtain the hydroclimatic variables from daily gridded datasets of precipitation and temperature, implementing a degree-day model to simulate spatially distributed snow accumulation and snow–ice melt. We estimate hydropower releases by a conceptual approach with a unique virtual reservoir regulated on the basis of a target-volume function, representing normal reservoir operating conditions throughout a hydrological year. An Iterative Input Selection algorithm is used to identify the variables with the highest predictive power for SSC, their explained variance, and characteristic time lags. On this basis, we develop a hydroclimatic multivariate rating curve (HMRC) which accounts for the contributions of the most relevant hydroclimatic input variables mentioned above. We calibrate the HMRC with a gradient-based nonlinear optimization method and we compare its performance with a traditional discharge-based rating curve. We apply the approach in the upper Rhône Basin, a large Swiss Alpine catchment heavily regulated by hydropower. Our results show that the three hydroclimatic processes – erosive rainfall, ice melt, and snowmelt – are significant predictors of mean daily SSC, while hydropower release does not have a significant explanatory power for SSC. The characteristic time lags of the hydroclimatic variables correspond to the typical flow concentration times of the basin. Despite not including discharge, the HMRC performs better than the traditional rating curve in reproducing SSC seasonality, especially during validation at the daily scale. While erosive rainfall determines the daily variability of SSC and extremes, ice melt generates the highest SSC per unit of runoff and represents the largest contribution to total suspended sediment yield. Finally, we show that the HMRC is capable of simulating climate-driven changes in fine sediment dynamics in Alpine catchments. In fact, HMRC can reproduce the changes in SSC in the past 40 years in the Rhône Basin connected to air temperature rise, even though the simulated changes are more gradual than those observed. The approach presented in this paper, based on the analysis of the hydroclimatic control of suspended sediment concentration, allows the exploration of climate-driven changes in fine sediment dynamics in Alpine catchments. The approach can be applied to any Alpine catchment with a pluvio-glacio-nival hydrological regime and adequate hydroclimatic datasets.


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