Abstract

Estuarine velocity distribution is a comprehensiveresult of oblique pressure, wind stress and wave radiationcaused by tidal, runoff and density gradient, which iscorresponding to applied forces: tidal flow, runoff flow, densityflow, wind-driven flow and wave-driven flow, all the factorscontribute to the actual flow. Based on the hydrodynamicfeature, the density flow and the wind-driven flow velocityformula in the complex estuarine waters, adopting log-linearmodel considering the effects of tidal acceleration anddeceleration on tidal current profile, the enumerating methodcombined with the least square is adopted to separate estuarineflow velocity. Directly separating the runoff flow and tidal flowis not available, a second separation should be taken to deal withit because both of them contain the logarithmic items. Firstly,runoff is separated from the period-averaged residual flow, thentidal, wind-driven flows and density flow can be obtained fromthe instant flow velocity data. The results show that this methodis simple in principle, practical in use and can be used toeffectively analyze the field data.