Modelling sensitivities to mixing and advection in a sill-basin estuarine system

Abstract

This study investigates the sensitivity of a high resolution regional ocean model to several choices in mixing and advection. The oceanographic process examined is a deep water renewal event in the Juan de Fuca Strait–Strait of Georgia sill-basin estuarine system located on the west coast of North America. Previous observational work has shown that the timing of the renewal events is linked to the spring/neap tidal cycle, and in turn, is sensitive to the amount of vertical mixing induced by tidal currents interacting with sills and complicated bathymetry. It is found that the model’s representation of deep water renewal is relatively insensitive to several mixing choices, including the vertical turbulence closure and direction of lateral mixing. No significant difference in deep or intermediate salinity was found between cases that used k−ϵ versus k−ω closures and isoneutral versus horizontal lateral mixing. Modifications that had a stronger effect included those that involved advection such as modifying the salinity of the open boundary conditions which supply the source waters for the renewal event. The strongest impact came from the removal of the Hollingsworth instability, a kinetic energy sink in the energy-enstrophy discretization of the momentum equations. A marked improvement to the salinity of the deep water renewal suggests that the removal of the Hollingsworth instability will correct a fresh drift in the deep and intermediate waters in an operational version of this model.