Hydrodynamic Drivers of Juvenile-Salmon Out-Migration in the Sacramento River: Secondary Circulation
Publication: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 144, Issue 8
Abstract
The entrances to the two lowest-survival migration routes for juvenile Chinook salmon in the tidal Sacramento River are located in the outside of a river bend where secondary circulation occurs. Three-dimensional simulations are conducted, in the Eulerian and Lagrangian frame, to understand tidal and secondary circulation effects on salmon migration route selection within this river reach. Fish were assumed to behave as neutrally-buoyant particles. Findings show that simulated particle entrainment rates into these routes tend to be larger than those expected from flow entrainment calculations alone, particularly during ebb tides, due to several factors. First, the fraction of the flow diverted to these routes tends to be higher in the shallowest layers, as a result of the secondary circulation that develops in the main river. Second, and supporting previous work done at the study site, the secondary circulation acting upstream also causes the surface-biased salmon distribution to be skewed toward the outside of the bend as they approach the entrance to the migration routes. As a result of these effects, the risk of particles being entrained is maximal near the surface, remaining higher than 50% during the course of a tidal cycle.
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Acknowledgments
This work is part of the project “North Delta Salmon Out-migration Study”, funded by the US Department of Interior―Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), solicitation No. 09SS200013. The authors thank the USGS in Sacramento, California for providing us with data collected in the field. Special thanks to Jon Burau and Aaron Blake for their guidance and feedback during the first author’s visit to the USGS in Sacramento, and to Paul Stumpner for his generous help with the analysis of the ADCP data. The authors also thank Andrea Hoyer for sharing her backward particle tracking model, and two anonymous reviewers for their thorough comments and suggestions. This manuscript was prepared in part while the first author visited Sacramento, which was funded by the Spanish Government. During the preparation of this manuscript the first author was supported by a PhD grant (Programa Estatal de Promoción del Talento y su Empleabilidad, subprograma de Formación de Profesorado Universitario) from the Spanish Government and a postdoctoral grant (Programa de Plan Propio de Investigación “Contratos Puente”) from the University of Granada.
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Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 144 • Issue 8 • August 2018
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©2018 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 16, 2017
Accepted: Jan 24, 2018
Published online: May 18, 2018
Published in print: Aug 1, 2018
Discussion open until: Oct 18, 2018
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