Modeling of Short-Term Transport in the Dardanelles Strait

Abstract

The Strait of Dardanelles is a long and shallow strongly stratified strait connecting Aegean and Marmara seas characterized by complicated time-varying oceanographic regime. The seasonal variability of exchange flows depends mainly on thetemperature, salinity and elevation changes in the adjacent seas, whereas short-term changes in the atmospheric pressure and the wind characteristics are responsible for short-term variability. Despite that these hydrodynamic conditions are critical for marine transport and hydraulic structures in the Strait, only a few observation and simulation studies were carried out. For this high resolution study, we use model SCHISM (Zhang et al., 2016) based on unstructured grids and a vertical coordinate system LSC2 (Localized Sigma Coordinates with Shaved Cell). The numerical experiments were focused on the period September 2008-January 2009 when measurement data were available. The meteorological fields were takenfrom ECMWF ERA-Interim reanalysis. Initial values for temperature and salinity were used from observations (MEDATLAS, 2003). At the open boundaries of the North Aegean Sea the elevation, velocity, temperature and salinity were used from CMEMS reanalysis (CMEMS, 2018). At the southern Bosphorus the discharge in upper and lower layers and corresponding temperature and salinity were prescribed from Jarosz et al. (2012). The simulation agrees with observed profiles of velocity a