A collaborative project with Tom Hsu and Kelsey Fall (University of Delaware) was funded by the Physical Oceanography program at NSF to investigate flocculation dynamics in estuarine boundary layers. The proposed work will transform our ability to understand and include flocculation dynamics in coastal modeling under different levels of primary productivity due to seasonal and spring-neap variability.
The novelty of the work includes the concurrent deployment of unique instrumentation (e.g., PICS, LISSTS, and FlocARAZI) to provide unprecedented details of in-situ data to reveal the interplay of turbulent shear, resuspension/deposition, and floc properties in the water column; the design of new laboratory experiment focusing on the transient response of flocs beyond equilibrium state to provide the largest dataset of floc sizes under different conditions produced to date; and rigorous specification of flocculation model coefficients informed by lab data and a data-driven approach for tackling the upscaling challenge of including flocculation effects in coupled sediment transport and hydrodynamic modeling.
