Sedimentation processes in a coral reef embayment : Hanalei Bay, Kauai

This paper is not subject to U.S. copyright. The definitive version was published in Marine Geology 264 (2009): 140-151, doi:10.1016/j.margeo.2009.05.002.Oceanographic measurements and sediment samples were collected during the summer of 2006 as part of a multi-year study of coastal circulation and the fate of terrigenous sediment on coral reefs in Hanalei Bay, Kauai. The goal of this study was to better understand sediment dynamics in a coral reef-lined embayment where winds, ocean surface waves, and river floods are important processes. During a summer period that was marked by two wave events and one river flood, we documented significant differences in sediment trap collection rates and the composition, grain size, and magnitude of sediment transported in the bay. Sediment trap collection rates were well correlated with combined wave-current near-bed shear stresses during the non-flood periods but were not correlated during the flood. The flood's delivery of fine-grained sediment to the bay initially caused high turbidity and sediment collection rates off the river mouth but the plume dispersed relatively quickly. Over the next month, the flood deposit was reworked by mild waves and currents and the fine-grained terrestrial sediment was advected around the bay and collected in sediment traps away from the river mouth, long after the turbid surface plume was gone. The reworked flood deposits, due to their longer duration of influence and proximity to the seabed, appear to pose a greater long-term impact to benthic coral reef communities than the flood plumes themselves. The results presented here display how spatial and temporal differences in hydrodynamic processes, which result from variations in reef morphology and orientation, cause substantial variations in the deposition, residence time, resuspension, and advection of both reef-derived and fluvial sediment over relatively short spatial scales in a coral reef embayment

A parametric model for ocean wave period from Ku band altimeter data

Using a large collocated data set of altimeter and buoy measurements, we examine the relationship between the altimeter Ku-band measurements of significant wave height, H s , backscatter coefficient, ? 0, and the buoy wave period. This is used to derive an empirical altimeter wave period model for TOPEX, Poseidon, Jason-1, ERS-2, Envisat, and GEOSAT follow-on. We show that there is a step change in the response of ? 0 at around 13 dB and above this value ? 0 is not related to wave period. The results are compared to algorithms proposed by two previous authors (Gommenginger et al., 2003; Quilfen et al., 2004) and examined in terms of absolute accuracy (RMS error), ability to replicate the joint distribution of wave height and period, and residual trends with various parameters. The new algorithm is shown to perform better than the previous algorithms in all metrics considered. Finally, we demonstrate that there is a limiting accuracy achievable for a function of the form f(H s , ? 0) and that our model comes close to this