Hans Burchard

Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research | IOW · Department of Physical Oceanography and Instrumentation

The Weser estuary has been subject to profound changes in topography in the past 100 years through natural variations and river engineering measures, leading to strong changes in hydrodynamics. These changes are also expected to have affected the dynamics of saltwater intrusion. Using numerical modelling, we examined saltwater intrusion in the Wese...

Plain Language Summary The upper ocean is characterized by a well‐mixed surface layer, below which temperature decreases rapidly with depth, forming the so‐called thermocline region. A corresponding salinity increase with depth is typically anticipated for stable density stratification to occur. Temperature and salinity inversions can, however, eme...

For Arctic estuaries that are characterized by landfast sea ice cover during the winter season, processes generating estuarine circulation and residual stratification have not yet been investigated, although some of the largest estuaries in the world belong to this class. Landfast sea ice provides a no-slip surface boundary condition in addition to...

Glider observations show a subsurface chlorophyll maximum (SCM) at the base of the seasonal pycnocline in the North Sea during stable summer conditions. A colocated peak in the dissipation rate of turbulent kinetic energy suggests the presence of active turbulence that potentially generates a nutrient flux to fuel the SCM. A one‐dimensional turbule...

The relationship between the salinity mixing, the diffusive salt transport, and the diahaline exchange flow is examined using salinity coordinates. The diahaline inflow and outflow volume transports are defined in this study as the integral of positive and negative values of the diahaline velocity. A numerical model of the Pearl River Estuary (PRE)...

The Weser estuary has been subject to profound changes in topography in the last hundred years through natural variations and river engineering measures, leading to strong changes in hydrodynamics. These changes are also expected to have affected the dynamics of saltwater intrusion. Using numerical modelling, we examined saltwater intrusion in the...

Basal melting of marine‐terminating glaciers, through its impact on the forces that control the flow of the glaciers, is one of the major factors determining sea level rise in a world of global warming. Detailed quantitative understanding of dynamic and thermodynamic processes in melt‐water plumes underneath the ice‐ocean interface is essential for...

We present a test case of river plume spreading to evaluate numerical methods used in coastal ocean modeling. It includes an estuary–shelf system whose dynamics combine nonlinear flow regimes with sharp frontal boundaries and linear regimes with cross-shore geostrophic balance. This system is highly sensitive to physical or numerical dissipation an...

The General Ocean Turbulence Model (GOTM) is a one-dimensional water column model, including a set of state-of-the-art turbulence closure models, and has widely been used in various applications in the ocean modeling community. Here, we extend GOTM to include a set of newly developed ocean surface vertical mixing parameterizations of Langmuir turbu...

A new parameterization for the estuarine turbulent eddy viscosity coefficient is developed considering the influence of wind forcing and feedback between stratification and shear. The emerging tidally averaged eddy viscosity profile AvT is parameterized as parabolic under well-mixed conditions, and is composed of a skewed-Gaussian-like form for the...

We present a test case of river plume spreading to evaluate numerical methods used in coastal ocean modeling. The main characteristics of the plume dynamics are predicted analytically, but are difficult to reproduce numerically because of numerical mixing present in the models. Our test case reveals the level of numerical mixing as well as the abil...

The General Ocean Turbulence Model (GOTM) is a one-dimensional water column model including a set of state-of-the-art turbulence closure models, and has widely been used in various applications in the ocean modeling community. Here we extend GOTM to include a set of newly developed ocean surface vertical mixing parameterizations of Langmuir turbule...

Recent studies could link the quantities of estuarine exchange flows to the volume-integrated mixing inside an estuary, where mixing is defined as the destruction of salinity variance. The existing mixing relations quantify mixing inside an estuary by the net boundary fluxes of volume, salinity, and salinity variance which are quantified as Knudsen...

Abstract The present study aims to estimate effective diahaline turbulent salinity fluxes and diffusivities in numerical model simulations of estuarine scenarios. The underlying method is based on a quantification of salinity mixing per salinity class, which is shown to be twice the turbulent salinity transport across the respective isohaline. Usin...

Recently discovered, ocean submesoscales have attracted considerable attention due to their ability to change the upper ocean stratification, affect vertical transport, and induce a downscale cascade of energy toward dissipation. In this paper, we highlight the effect of submesoscale fronts and filaments on surface layer properties and dynamics dur...

We review the state of knowledge about offshore wind farm (OWF) development-related effects on hydrodynamics and their possible secondary effects on fishes derived from European studies. Theoretical, modeling, and observational studies of OWF developments are relatively advanced and identify potential impacts resulting from OWF changes to local or...

The hydrodynamics in estuaries is mainly governed by the competition between a horizontal density gradient, friction, and wind stress. The sensitivity of the estuarine exchange flow to the wind stress increases in the absence of tides, which is investigated here using the example of the weakly tidal Warnow river estuary in the southwestern Baltic S...

Processes of stratification and destratification in the German Bight region of fresh water influence (ROFI) are investigated following an extreme river discharge event in June 2013. For this purpose, a high-resolution baroclinic ocean model is set up and validated against field data. The model results are used to study the temporal and spatial vari...

Results from measurements are presented that were collected during a full tidal cycle in the Ems estuary, involving two landers and an anchored research vessel. The conditions were characterized by very weak winds, no wave effects, and low river run-off, so that the state was close to tide-only. We find that the lateral (i.e., cross-slope) transpor...

The Total Exchange Flow analysis framework computes consistent bulk values quantifying the estuarine exchange flow using salinity coordinates since salinity is the main contributor to density in estuaries and the salinity budget is entirely controlled by the exchange flow. For deeper and larger estuaries temperature may contribute equally or even m...

Zusammenfassung Als Grundlage für die Erstellung der Klima-Anpassungsstrategie Wattenmeer 2100 des Landes Schleswig-Holstein wurde mit dem Modell GETM die morphologische Langzeit-entwicklung in den schleswig-holsteinischen Tidesystemen Lister Tief und Piep für meh-rere hydro-meteorologische Antriebsszenarien projiziert. Für zwei Projektionszeiträum...

A universal law of estuarine mixing is derived here, combining the approaches of salinity coordinates, Knudsen relations, Total Exchange Flow, mixing definition as salinity variance loss, and the mixing - exchange flow relation. As a result, the long-term average mixing within an estuarine volume bounded by the isohaline of salinity S amounts to M(...

For more than a century, estuarine exchange flow has been quantified by means of the Knudsen relations which connect bulk quantities such as inflow and outflow volume fluxes and salinities. These relations are closely linked to estuarine mixing. The recently developed Total Exchange Flow (TEF) analysis framework, which uses salinity coordinates to...

This paper presents thickness-weighted averaging (TWA) in generalized vertical coordinates as a unified framework for a variety of existing tidal-averaging concepts in seas and estuaries. Vertical profiles of resulting residual quantities depend on the specific vertical coordinate, which is held fixed during the averaging process. This dependence i...

For more than a century, estuarine exchange flow has been quantified by means of the Knudsen relations which connect bulk quantities such as inflow and outflow volume fluxes and salinities. These relations are closely linked to estuarine mixing. The recently developed Total Exchange flow (TEF) which uses salinity coordinates to calculate these bulk...

The well-known Knudsen relations and the total exchange flow (TEF) analysis framework provide quantifications of exchange flow across an open boundary to the adjacent ocean in terms of bulk values (Knudsen theory: inflow and outflow volume or salinity) or with resolution in salinity space (TEF: profiles of volume and salt flux in salinity coordinat...

In straight tidal estuaries, residual overturning circulation results mainly from a competition between gravitational forcing, wind forcing, and friction. To systematically investigate this for tidally energetic estuaries, the dynamics of estuarine cross sections is analyzed in terms of the relation between gravitational forcing, wind stress, and t...

Transport algorithms of numerical ocean circulation models are frequently exhibiting truncation errors leading to spurious diapycnal mixing of water masses. This chapter discusses methods that might be useful in diagnosing spurious diapycnal mixing and describes some approaches that might be helpful for its reduction. The first one is related to th...

Baltic Transcoast ist ein durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft finanziertes Graduiertenkolleg. Unser Hauptziel ist die Ausbildung von Experten für den Küstenraum. Wir untersuchen die deutsche Ostseeküste als terrestrisch-marine Schnittstelle für Wasser- und Stoffflüsse. Seit Januar 2016 laufen insgesamt 13 Doktroarbeiten, die Angang 2019 ferti...

Coastal zones connect terrestrial and marine ecosystems forming a unique environment that is under increasing anthropogenic pressure. Rising sea levels, sinking coasts, and changing precipitation patterns modify hydrodynamic gradients and may enhance sea–land exchange processes in both tidal and non-tidal systems. Furthermore, the removal of flood...

The Knudsen theorem for estuarine exchange flow, based on mass conservation of water and salt, and its generalization with resolution in salinity coordinates, the Total Exchange Flow (TEF) analysis framework, are reviewed here. The former had been developed, and applied to quantify exchange flow between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, more than a...

The relationship between net mixing and the estuarine exchange flow may be quantified using a salinity variance budget. Here "mixing" is defined as the rate of destruction of volume-integrated salinity variance, and the exchange flow is quantified using the total exchange flow. These concepts are explored using an idealized 3D model estuary. It is...

Shelf and coastal sea processes extend from the atmosphere through the water column and into the seabed. These processes reflect intimate interactions between physical, chemical, and biological states on multiple scales. As a consequence, coastal system modelling requires a high and flexible degree of process and domain integration; this has so far...

Accelerated sea level rise may have serious implications for the Wadden Sea ecosystem in its present state. If sediment accumulation rates on the extensive intertidal flats stay behind sea level rise, the flats will eventually submerge. Drowning of the flats has negative consequences for nature conservation and for coastal risk management. Based up...

The state of the art of the numerics of hydrostatic structured-grid coastal ocean models is reviewed here. First, some fundamental differences in the hydrodynamics of the coastal ocean, such as the large surface elevation variation compared to the mean water depth, are contrasted against large scale ocean dynamics. Then the hydrodynamic equations a...

Estuarine turbidity maxima (ETMs) are generated by a large suite of hydrodynamic and sediment dynamic processes, leading to longitudinal convergence of cross-sectionally integrated and tidally averaged transport of cohesive and noncohesive suspended particulate matter (SPM). The relative importance of these processes for SPM trapping varies substan...

The impact of sea level rise (SLR) on the future morphological development of the Wadden Sea (North Sea) is investigated by means of extensive process-resolving numerical simulations. A new sediment and morphodynamic module was implemented in the well-established 3D circulation model GETM. A number of different validations are presented, ranging fr...

The activity of macrofauna on the sea floor is since long known to mediate deposition and erosion of suspended sediment, but so far most studies addressed this effect at a local scale. In the present paper, the contribution of the observed macrofauna distribution (exemplified by a bivalve, the bean-like Fabulina fabula, formerly known as Tellina fa...

Shelf and coastal sea processes extend from the atmosphere through the water column and into the sea bed. These processes are driven by physical, chemical, and biological interactions at local scales, and they are influenced by transport and cross strong spatial gradients. The linkages between domains and many different processes are not adequately...

Simulations of the North Sea circulation by the global ocean model MPI-OM and the regional ocean models GETM, HAMSOM, NEMO, TRIM are compared against each other and with observational data for the period 1998-2009. The aim of the study is to evaluate the quality of the simulations in particular with respect to their suitability to drive biogeochemi...

We present a systematic analysis of generation mechanisms for exchange flows in partially stratified estuaries using water column (1DV) and width-averaged (2DV) numerical models. We focus on exchange flows generated by eddy viscosity - shear covariance (ESCO). We identify two distinctly different physical mechanisms. The first, tidal ESCO circulati...

This paper discusses and explains the phenomenon of salinity inversions in the thermocline offshore from an upwelling region during upwelling favorable winds. Using the nontidal central Baltic Sea as an easily accessible natural laboratory, high-resolution transect and station observations in the upper layers are analyzed. The data show local salin...

A baroclinic three-dimensional numerical model for the entire Wadden Sea of the German Bight in the southern North Sea is first assessed by comparison to field data for surface elevation, current velocity, temperature, and salinity at selected stations and then used to calculate fluxes of volume and salt inside the Wadden Sea and the exchange betwe...

High-resolution water column observations have been carried out in the Wadden Sea to understand suspended particulate mater (SPM) transport in well-mixed tidal channels . These observations include more than 4000 consecutive CTD-, micro-structure shear and turbidity profiles from a free-falling micro-structure probe, as well as velocity data from a...

In numerous studies, the functioning of estuarine circulation has been investigated, under idealized conditions, by means of numerical models. This has led to a deep understanding of the theory of estuarine residual flows. However, the question as to how estuarine circulation is established in real estuaries, in response to their topographical and...

Highly intermittent spatial variability of phytoplankton is observed ubiquitously in marine ecosystems, especially when measurements are performed at the micro-scale level. Therefore, theoretical developments and new modelling tools are required to understand the observed small-scale vertical structure and its relationship to ecosystem behaviour. N...

In December 2014, an exceptional inflow event into the Baltic Sea was observed, a so-called Major Baltic Inflow (MBI). Such inflow events are important for the deep water ventilation in the Baltic Sea and typically occur every 3-10 years. Based on first observational data sets, this inflow had been ranked as the third largest since 100 years. With...

In this study, we present estuarine circulation driven by horizontal density gradients generated by spatially homogeneous surface buoyancy fluxes over sloping bathymetry as a dynamical feature in the coastal zone being potentially relevant for cross-coastal transports. A combination of downward buoyancy flux (net precipitation, net heating) togethe...

This paper quantifies spurious dissipation and mixing of various advection schemes in idealised experiments of lateral shear and baroclinic instabilities in numerical simulations of a re-entrant Eady channel for configu- rations with large and small Rossby numbers. In addition, a two-dimensional barotropic shear instability test case is used to exa...

Shelf seas such as the North Sea and the Baltic Sea are characterised by spatially and temporally varying stratification that is highly relevant for their physical dynamics and the evolution of their ecosystems. Stratification may vary from unstably stratified (e.g., due to convective surface cooling) to strongly stratified with density jumps of up...

AbstractThe dependency of the estuarine circulation on the depth-to-width ratio of a periodically, weakly stratified tidal estuary is systematically investigated here for the first time. Currents, salinity and other properties are simulated by means of the General Estuarine Transport Model (GETM) in cross-sectional slice mode, applying a symmetric...

AbstractCross-channel transect measurements of microstructure and velocity in a well-mixed and curved tidal inlet in the German Wadden Sea show the occurrence of significant late flood stratification. This stratification is found to be a result of lateral straining. This study observes a strong single-cell lateral circulation, which is strongly pro...

Stratification and de-stratification processes in a tidally energetic, weakly stratified inlet in the Wadden Sea (south eastern North Sea) are investigated in this modeling study. Observations of current velocity and vertical density structure show strain-induced periodic stratification for the southern shoal of the tidal channel. In contrast to th...

In this paper, an unconditionally positive and multi-element conserving time stepping scheme for systems of non-linearly coupled ODE's is presented. These systems of ODE's are used to describe biogeochemical transformation processes in marine ecosystem models. The numerical scheme is a positive-definite modification of the Runge-Kutta method, it ca...

It is well known that in numerical models the advective transport relative to fixed or moving grids needs to be discretised with sufficient accuracy to minimise the spurious decay of tracer variance (spurious mixing). In this paper a general analysis of discrete variance decay (DVD) caused by advective and diffusive fluxes is established. Lacking a...

We use an observational dataset of tidal gauges in the North Sea, to investigate the annual cycle of the M2 and M4 amplitudes and phases. The sea surface elevation amplitude of the M2 can vary by 8-10% and the M4 amplitude by 12-30% over the course of the year, with larger amplitudes in summer. The annual phase variations are in the range of 3-15 d...

The Global Ecology and Oceanography of Harmful Algal Blooms (GEOHAB) program of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, was created in 1999 to foster research on the ecological and oceanographic mechanisms underlying the population dynamics of harmful algal blooms (HABs...

[1] Estuarine convergence (landward reduction of width and/or depth) is known to have the potential to significantly enhance estuarine circulation, a result theoretically derived under the assumption of constant eddy viscosity. Recent studies of longitudinally uniform energetic tidal channels indicate that tidal straining, a process driven by tidal...

Recent results from a tracer release experiment have shown that, similar to many lakes and ocean basins, deep-water mixing in the Baltic Sea is largely determined by mixing processes occurring in the energetic near-bottom region. Due to the complexity and small vertical extent of this region, however, previous modeling studies of the Baltic Sea hav...

In this paper the use of turbulence closure models in coastal ocean models is reviewed. Two-equation turbulence closure models are argued to be an optimal compromise between efficiency and accuracy for the purpose of calculating diapycnal fluxes of momenturn, heat and tracers in coastal ocean modelling. They provide enough degrees of freedom to be...

The dynamics of cooling water spreading in a non-tidal embayment is subject of a modelling-based study of Greifswald Bay, a shallow embayment at the south-western coast of the Baltic Sea. Potential cooling water spreading due to a possible power plant at Greifswald Bay is evaluated as differences between a realistic hind-cast simulation and a simil...

In this study a model system consisting of the three-dimensional General Estuarine Transport Model (GETM) and the third generation wind wave model SWAN was developed. Both models were coupled in two-way mode. The effects of waves were included into the ocean model by implementing the depth-dependent Radiation stress formulation (RS) of Mellor (2011...

In this idealized numerical modeling study, the composition of residual sediment fluxes in energetic (e.g., weakly or periodically stratified) tidal estuaries is investigated by means of one-dimensional water column models, with some focus on the sediment availability. Scaling of the underlying dynamic equations shows dependence of the results on t...

Globally coupled climate models are generally capable of reproducing the observed trends in the globally averaged atmospheric temperature. However, the global models do not perform as well on regional scales. Here, we present results from four 100-year, high-resolution ocean model experiments (resolution less than 1 km) for the western Baltic Sea....

The increasing demand for the investigation of nonhydrostatic effects in ocean modelling requires crucial modifications to models applying the hydrostatic pressure assumption. Within many studies the capability of the pressure-correcting projection method for the inclusion of the missing nonhydrostatic pressure contribution into an existing hydrost...