Observations on the size and settling velocity distributions of suspended sediment in the Pearl River Estuary, China

Using in situ and Satellite Hyperspectral Data to Estimate the Surface Suspended Sediments Concentrations in the Pearl River Estuary

“…According to the collected data during these cruises, the content of TSM has a wide range from 6 to 140 mg/L, and its averaged content (with the standard deviation) is 39.1 mg/L ( 28.5 mg/L), which is close to other observation results [25] at this area. As shown in Fig.…”

“…In the study area, the network of abundant rivers provide many sources of sediments from the upper reach, and the human activities also disturb the estuary bed and lead to the re-suspension of bed sediments, e.g., dredging, ships' passing-by. The different sources of sediments vary in particle size and constituents [25]. Sky conditions changed greatly during the cruises, the empirical method to remove the Fresnel effects of sky light [20] is not adequate and thus bring some errors, which will also contribute to the variations of .…”

Relationship between nutrients and plankton biomass in the turbidity maximum zone of the Pearl River Estuary

“…Pearl River has three main tributaries, West, North and East Rivers, which pass through a complex river network and flow into the South China Sea through eight entrances. The total annual runoff reaches 3.33 × 10 11 m 3 and has an annual suspended sediment load of 8.87 × 10 7 tons (Zhao, 1990;Xia et al, 2004). The PRE has a high loading of anthropogenic nutrients from activities in agriculture, fish dike farming and sewage effluents due to the high population and economic development in Pearl River delta region (Yin, 2002;Huang et al, 2003) The TMZ in the PRE is well developed and is primarily characterized by a high TSS compared with adjacent waters.…”

Effects of attached bacteria on organic aggregate settling velocity in seawater

“…The aggregate settling velocities that we determined in the present study (0.003 to 0.014 cm s Fennessy et al 1994, Christiansen et al 2002, Xia et al 2004. These particles, which are within the smaller size range of marine settling particles (Simon et al 2002, McDonnell & Buesseler 2012, are abundant in seawater and can account for a large fraction (up to 20%) of total carbon sinking fluxes, as recently estimated for the subtropical Sargasso Sea (McDonnell & Buesseler 2012).…”