River Robots: Utilizing novel autonomous technologies, observations, and models to investigate freshwater coastal dispersion.

Shelf sea and coastal physics models still need to improve on their ability to model riverine inputs into the coastal seas, which is partly caused by poor knowledge of the riverine input itself. With novel autonomous technologies, it is now possible to continuously observe the littoral zone from the river to the coastal ocean. This will help to answer research questions on how horizontal dispersion of river input varies with tidal amplitude, wind state and river flow rate and what morphological features have the greatest impact on the dispersion of river inputs.

Additionally, it can be investigated how seasonal patterns of ocean properties like temperature, salinity and density respond to varying levels of riverine inputs. With this knowledge it can then be investigated how well models reproduce these findings.

Supervisors

Professor Mark Inall, SAMS

Funder

SUPER DTP

University

University of the Highlands and Islands