The Cross-Shelf Regime of a Wind-Driven Supercritical River Plume

Abstract

River plumes are a dominant forcing agent in the coastal ocean, transporting tracers and nutrients offshore and interacting with coastal circulation. In this study we characterize the novel ‘cross-shelf’ regime of freshwater river plumes. Rather than remaining coastally-trapped (a well-established regime), a wind-driven cross-shelf plume propagates for tens to over one hundred kilometers offshore of the river mouth while remaining coherent. We perform a suite of high-resolution idealized numerical experiments that offer insight into how the cross-shelf regime comes about and the parameter space it occupies. The wind-driven shelf flow comprising the geostrophic along-shelf and the Ekman cross-shelf transport advects the plume momentum and precludes geostrophic adjustment within the plume, leading to continuous generation of internal solitons in the offshore and upstream segment of the plume. The solitons propagate into the plume interior, transporting mass within the plume and suppressing plume widening. We examine an additional ultra-high resolution case that resolves submesoscale dynamics. This case is dynamically consistent with the lower resolution simulations, but additionally captures vigorous inertial-symmetric instability leading to frontal erosion and lateral mixing. We support these findings with observations of the Winyah Bay plume, where the cross-shelf regime is observed under analogous forcing conditions to the model. The study offers an in-depth introduction to the cross-shelf plume regime and a look into the submesoscale mixing phenomena arising in estuarine plumes.