Search

Particle tracking is widely utilized to study transport features in a range of physical, chemical, and biological processes in oceanography. In this study, a new offline particle tracking package, Tracker, is introduced and its performance is evaluated in comparison to an online Eulerian dye, one online and three offline particle tracking software packages in a small high-resolution (200 m) model domain and a large coarser (1000 m) model domain. It was found that both particle and dye approaches give similar results across different model resolutions and domains when they were tracking the same water mass, as indicated by similar mean advection pathways and spatial distributions of dye and particles. The flexibility of offline particle tracking and its similarity against online dye and particle tracking make it a useful tool to complement existing ocean circulation models. Lastly, the new Tracker was shown to be a reliable particle tracking package to complement the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS), and tradeoffs of performance, modifiability, and ease of use that can influence the choice of which package to use are discussed.

Matlab file saving the particle tracking results (07/28/2020-08/06/2020); the plotting codes can be found inhttps://github.com/Jilian0717/LPT-Bio_model

Thisdataset supplements the article: Xiong, J., Shen, J., Vertical Transport Timescale of Surface-Produced Particulate Material in Chesapeake Bay, submitted totheJournal of Geophysical Research: Oceans contact: Jilian Xiong, jxiong@vims.edu or xiongjilian@gmail.com

Abundance of fecal coliform (FC) is widely used to indicate the potential presence of pathogens, the No.1 cause of water impairments in the U.S. Despite extensive monitoring efforts, assessing and modeling FC pollution still faces challenges, largely owing to the uncertainties in estimation of overall removal rate (K). This study proposes an alternative method to estimate in situ K by combining observational data, hydrodynamic simulation, and analytical solution. The method requires the observed spatial distribution of FC concentration along an estuarine channel and the numerically-simulated transit time, and converts the K estimation from a temporal problem into a spatial problem, potentially reducing survey duration, effort, and cost. Application of the method gave an estimation of K = 0.5 d-1 on average for the Nassawadox Creek in Chesapeake Bay. The numerical and analytical model results with the estimated K agreed well with the observation, demonstrating the credibility of the method.