Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Stability Of Sand Waves In A Tidally-Influenced Shipping Channel, Tampa Bay, Florida, John Willis Gray

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Tidally-influenced sandwaves are common coastal features present in various settings, including shipping channels. The main shipping channel in Tampa Bay under the Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway Bridge (a.k.a. the Skyway Bridge) contains such sandwave bedforms. Between the years 2000 and 2017, these bedforms have been surveyed with multibeam echosounders (MBES) on 21 occasions with ranging coverage and quality of returns. Surveys between 2000 and 2009 used a 300 kHz Kongsberg EM3000; surveys between 2015 and 2017 used a 400 kHz Reson Seabat 7125. For comparable surveys, bathymetry, backscatter, slope, curvature, planform curvature, and profile curvature maps were created and analyzed. …