An Integrated Resilient Sediment Transport RIsk Management (IRSTRIM) Approach for Estuaries

Abstract

Estuaries around the world are facing numerous threats, including urbanization, industrialization, resource scarcity, and the impacts of climate change. To increase estuarine resilience, it is crucial to manage these ecosystems to maintain their functionality. Sediment transport resilience is a critical factor that affects the performance objectives of navigation, storm damage reduction, and ecosystem restoration. This paper focuses on an integrated resilient sediment transport risk management (IRSTRIM) approach for estuaries. The framework quantifies resilience indexes such as reaction amplitude, graduality, and recovery rates of “sediment transport” to “river and sea interaction” in the Arvand Estuary, the Persian Gulf. Additionally, three indexes, the tidal asymmetry index (TAI), saltwater intrusion vulnerability index, and infill rate, are developed to aid in resilient sediment management. The quantified indexes successfully incorporated tidal asymmetry, sediment characteristics, bed properties, and flow hydrodynamics. Different resilience and resistance management scenarios are evaluated using a decision support system. Based on the results, tidal barrier application, as a resilience scenario, is the best scenario, and the dredging scenario, as a resistance one, is the worst scenario. The reaction amplitude with a weight of 0.39, and the TAI with a weight of 0.27 are determined as the most effective indexes.

Two-dimensional-one-dimensional splitting scheme for the numerical solution of problems of transport of multicomponent suspensions using θ coordinates

“…The numerical implementation of the model is based on additive splitting schemes along geometric directions. Real three-dimensional turbulence in coastal systems can be considered locally homogeneous and isotropic only on scales significantly smaller than the depth of the water area, since the stratification of water in a well-mixed shallow reservoir is limited by the maximum vertical size of turbulent eddies [2][3][4][5][6]. It is believed that for the latter reason, the process of turbulent mixing can be divided into horizontal turbulent exchange and vertical turbulent diffusion.…”