García-Cartagena, Edgardo J.

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Ocean circulation modeling of the San Juan bay
(2013) García-Cartagena, Edgardo J.; Cancelos, Silvina; College of Engineering; Canals, Miguel; Morell, Julio; Gutierrez, Gustavo; Leonardi, Stefano; Department of Mechanical Engineering; Ramírez, Lillian
The Regional Ocean Modeling System has been implemented in the San Juan bay estuary, Puerto Rico, to investigate quantitatively the ocean currents at a harbor scale with tidal, wind and river forcing and to develop a forecast system to support emergency planning and resource management in the area. A hind-cast simulation is performed and compared with measurements from an acoustic Doppler current profiler and tide gages to validate the numerical model. Good agreement has been found with coastal observations of sea surface height and time series of the velocity. From a statistical analysis it is found that the numerical model has a 60 percent of prediction accuracy. To investigate the impact of river discharge inside the San Juan bay a numerical experiment of the response to river discharge is performed and compared with the wind and tidal forcing only. Results show how the salinity distributions is affected by fresh water discharge inside the bay when the river is present. Small differences are observed in the sea surface velocity, however, barotropic velocity does not get affected by the river.