An ecosystem management model system for the Satilla River Estuary, Georgia

An estuarine ecosystem management model system has been established for the Satilla River Estuary, Georgia. This system consists of 5 major modules: 1) the mesoscale meteorological model (MM5); 2) the unstructured grid finite-volume coastal ocean model (FVCOM); 3) the unstructured grid finite-volume water quality (WQ) model; 4) the suspended sediment model; and 5) the computer interface GUI system. The finite-volume method used in FVCOM-WQ combines the advantage of the finite-element method for grid flexibility and finite-difference methods for the simplest discrete computation. FVCOM-WQ is coded with a 3-D mass conservative wet/dry point module that is capable to simulate the flooding/drying process over estuarine-tidal creek-intertidal salt marsh complex. This estuarine management system has been validated through a year-round hindcast experiment with direct comparison with the field measurement data. Driven by realtime tidal forcing, river discharge, winds and heat fluxes, this system has shown promise as a way to capture both short-term (daily to week) and long-term (seasonal) temporal and variability of currents and salinity in the Satilla River Estuary. An experiment is also being conducted to validate and calibrate the water quality model under reliable model-predicted hydrodynamic fields. The detailed description of this management system and hindcast model results can be viewed at the Georgia Sea Grant website: http://www.marsci.uga.edu/gaseagrant/research.html.