HPCCprojects:HPC-research-00018

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Aaron Bever

Hydrodynamics and Sediment-Transport in the Poverty Bay Portion of the Waipaoa Sedimentary System 2006/01/01 2012/12/31 Funding was provided for this work by NSF through the MARGINS Source-to-Sink initiative.

Poverty Bay is located on the eastern coast of the North Island of New Zealand, and is situated between the terrestrial and marine portions of the Waipaoa River Sedimentary Dispersal System. Poverty Bay acts as an important transition zone, where any riverine signals are potentially modified before reaching the continental shelf. The Poverty Bay shoreline has been prograding at an ever decreasing rate for the last 7 kya, implying that some sediment is sequestered within the bay. This project aims to better understand the transfer of sediment from the mouth of the Waipaoa River through Poverty Bay onto the continental shelf. To this aim, hydrodynamic and sediment-transport observations were collected within the nearshore of Poverty Bay and are used along with coupled hydrodynamic and wave numerical models that extend to the shelf break to better understand the routing of sediment through Poverty Bay on a daily to seasonal time-scale. Also, multiple Poverty Bay geometries are modeled to investigate how changing the geometry of the dispersal basin affects the oceanographic energy available to cause marine dispersal, and how any changes to marine dispersal effect the amount of sediment sequestered within Poverty Bay or any changes to the characteristics of the sediment supplied to the continental shelf.

ROMS

SWAN

Wiberg and Smith model