Concentration statistics of solute transport for the near field zone of an estuary

Rivers are considered as one of the most influential hydrological pathways for the waterborne transport and therefore estuaries are critical areas for a pollution hazard that might lead to eutrophication and general water quality deterioration. This paper is investigating the near field mixing in the estuary as the result of a combination of small scale turbulent diffusion and a larger scale variation of the advective mean velocities. In this work concentration moments were developed directly from the fundamental advection-diffusion equation for the case of continuous, steady, conservative solute transport with the dominant stream flow mean velocity. The concentration statistics were developed considering depth integrated velocity field with mean velocity attenuation due to the wind induced currents and sea tides. In order to perform further studies of developed concentration moments, a set of velocity measurements in the local river Žrnovnica estuary near Split, Croatia, was conducted and numerical random walk particle tracking model was used to run the transport simulations based on measured velocity fields. The numerical model has confirmed quantitatively first two concentration moments, which are utilized to calculate the point concentration probability density function (pdf) often needed to assess the risk of exceeding the allowed concentration values in the estuary.