Modeling sediment transport in the York River : final report

Numerical simulation on the formation of an Estuarine Turbidity Maximum (ETM) is a difficult task because of the incomplete knowledge on cohesive sediment transport. For example, it is difficult to well simulate the erosion process when the bed erosion properties are only poorly known. It is also hard to simulate the settling process when the bulk density and size of suspended sediment flocs are changing with the ambient environments. Despite of the difficulties, some processes can be parametricalized, even not perfectly, to make the simulation results close to observed. In this project, we demonstrated the possibility of using a constant erosion rate and the assumption that erosion only occurs at tidal acceleration phases to simulate the formation of turbidity maximums in the York River