Drifter Trajectories in Riverine Environments
Abstract
The long-term goal is to understand the Lagrangian surface behavior in natural riverine systems by deploying a fleet of GPS-equipped drifters. The primary objective is to deploy NPS and QinetiQ GPS-equipped surface drifters in a number of natural rivers to describe dispersion and the spatially varying velocity field. The drifter observations will be compared to the underlying river morphology and compared with numerical models, such as Delft3D and USGS river models. Position tracking drifters offer a new perspective in describing flow characteristics in riverine environments that has been previously overlooked. The approach is to: 1) deploy 20-40 GPS-equipped drifters over a number of reaches in Kootenai River, ID, Trinity River, CA, Klamath River, CA, Skagit River, WA, and Elkhorn Slough, CA, 2) perform data quality control, transform positions into local along- and across channel river coordinates, and estimate the velocity field and dispersion, 3) relate these observations to the river morphology and describe the drifter trajectories, 4) and compare these drifter observations to Delft3D and USGS models.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA527084
Entities
People
- Jamie MacMahan
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School