Reconstruction of historical estuarine inflows from tidal records.
Abstract
The historic, pre-development condition of estuaries is of great interest for assessment of climatological and anthropogenic change, and as baseline data for future management. In the Northeast Pacific basin, the historic condition of estuaries is vital for understanding declines in salmonid populations. River inflow has changed due to climate change, as well as flow regulation, irrigation withdrawals, and channel modification. Estimation of historic flows is an important component of the estimation the overall, pre-development state of an estuary. Tidal height records are generally the longest available environmental record for estuarine systems, and frequently pre-date measurements of river flow, at least in the lower (tidal) reaches of major rivers. Thus, tidal records are attractive dataset to use for reconstruction of river flow. The mechanistic connection between river flow and tidal properties is the frictional interaction of flow with the tide - changes in flow change the tidal frequency spectrum (the latter normalized by the tidal potential or data from a nearby coastal station). Standard and robust harmonic analysis methods are used to estimate tidal constituents from the available high-low water records from Astoria, Oregon, USA from 1855 to 1868. Hourly records from 1870-1871 are used to verify tidal predictions from the high-low dataset. Bootstrap error estimation methods, previously applied to regularly-sampled tidal heights, are adapted to calculate confidence intervals for constituents calculated from the irregularly sampled high-low data. Empirical relationships between measured flow and tidal constituents are developed from the 1925-1955 time period. Using these relations, the riverine inflow to the Columbia estuary is estimated for the 1855-1868 time period, including the historic winter and spring floods of 1861-62, both amongst the larger known for the Columbia.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2008
- Bibcode:
- 2008AGUFMOS11D1167L
- Keywords:
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- 4215 Climate and interannual variability (1616;
- 1635;
- 3305;
- 3309;
- 4513);
- 4235 Estuarine processes (0442);
- 4560 Surface waves and tides (1222)