Ocean Sci., 14, 139–159, 2018 https://doi.org/10.5194/os-14-139-2018 © Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Effect of winds and waves on salt intrusion in the Pearl River estuary Wenping Gong1,2, Zhongyuan Lin1,2, Yunzhen Chen1,2, Zhaoyun Chen1,2, and Heng Zhang1,2,3 1School of Marine Science, SunYat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, China 2Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Marine Resources and Coastal Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, China 3Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, China Correspondence: Heng Zhang (
[email protected]) Received: 20 August 2017 – Discussion started: 5 September 2017 Revised: 5 December 2017 – Accepted: 10 January 2018 – Published: 28 February 2018 Abstract. Salt intrusion in the Pearl River estuary (PRE) is a season from November to the following March and water is dynamic process that is influenced by a range of factors and contaminated with salt to such a degree that the fresh water to date, few studies have examined the effects of winds and supply is hampered. Meanwhile, as salt intrusion affects the waves on salt intrusion in the PRE. We investigate these ef- estuarine density gradient, circulation, and mixing processes fects using the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere-Wave-Sediment (MacCready and Geyer, 2010; Geyer and MacCready, 2014), Transport (COAWST) modeling system applied to the PRE. it affects the residence time of nutrients and contaminants After careful validation, the model is used for a series of di- (Ren et al., 2014; Sun et al., 2014); flocculation, resuspen- agnostic simulations.