Abstract
Salt intrusion has some negative impact on the estuarine eco-environment as well as the water resource potential. The paper proposes an analytical model to describe salt intrusion in the estuaries with multiple freshwater sources. The impact of river discharge on the salinity distribution changes along the multiple-fresh-source estuaries, which is different from estuaries with single source of freshwater. Our analytical model is derived from the advection–dispersion equation for salinity while taking into account the hydrodynamic variation along the estuary. In this paper, we take the Humen Estuary, a strongly tide-dominated estuary with two major source of freshwater, as an example to illustrate the model. By testing against eight surveys over a complete spring-neap tidal cycle, the analytical model’s capacity to describe salt intrusion in the Humen Estuary is calibrated and validated. The results show that the analytical method can be used to compute the salinity distribution in the multiple-freshwater-source estuaries. In comparison with the field data in the Humen Estuary, the calculated results indicate that the salt intrusion process exhibits remarkable segmentation in the multiple-freshwater-source estuary, although the estuary’s inherent characteristic remains the same throughout the estuary. Moreover, by analyzing the multi-segmental features of the Humen Estuary, an efficient and effective model to predict the salt intrusion length of the Humen Estuary is presented and satisfactory results are obtained to illustrate its practical application.
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Acknowledgements
This research was financially supported by the “National Natural Science Foundation of China” (NSFC, Project Nos. 41676078), “National Key R&D Program of China” (Project Nos. 2017YFC0405900), “Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province” (Project Nos. BK20151499), “Open Research Foundation of Key Laboratory of the Pearl River Estuarine Dynamics and Associated Process Regulation, Ministry of Water Resources” (Project Nos. [2017]KJ04), “Project of Jiangsu Provincial Six- Talent Peaks” (Project Nos. XXRJ-008), and supported by the “Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities” (Project Nos. 2015B26414; 2017B21514; 2016B10414).
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Xu, Y., Zhang, W., Zhu, Y. et al. Analytical solution for salt intrusion in multiple-freshwater-source estuaries: application to Humen Estuary. Environ Earth Sci 76, 661 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-017-6986-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-017-6986-x