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Interfacial Mixing In A Highly Stratified Estuary: 1. Characteristics Of Mixing, David J. Kay, David A. Jay

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article is Part I of a set of papers addressing mixing in a highly stratified estuary. Measurements of interfacial turbulence were made in Columbia River estuary under conditions of moderate river flow and neap tides. A flux correlation method was used to determine buoyancy fluxes, and fits to theoretical velocity and temperature variance spectra were used to measure turbulent kinetic and potential energy dissipation rates. At the measurement site in the interior of the estuary, mixing along the top of the salt wedge is found to occur only on ebb, during periods when the internal Froude number is supercritical. …