CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The Rio de la Plata (RdP) is one of the most turbid estuaries in the world and one of the most important in terms of continental discharge and drainage area. The RdP has large social, ecological and economic importance for the countries along its shores and along the tributary rivers of its basin. Numerical models are excellent tools for conducting process studies and testing hypotheses based on observations. They constitute ?laboratory? that permit ?including? and/or ?removing? the different forcings, or modifying the natural environmental conditions (bathymetry, geometry, etc.), in order to analyze their individual or combined effects. Observations of suspended fine sediments, particularly those remote and in situ collected on recent studies, have driven to the statement of several hypotheses about the processes that would determine the concentration of suspended sediments in the different parts of the estuary. Nevertheless, the relative scarcity of data do not allow to demonstrate the validity of those hypothesis and the role of several physical processes and of the morphology remain unknown. The objective of this work is, therefore, to analyze the role of the different forcing and the environmental conditions in the determination of the distribution of suspended fine sediments in the RdP applying processes oriented numerical simulations. This work also aims to provide some insight on several processes which effect is almost unknown, as the estuarine circulation, the effect of the large estuary widening at the imaginary line between Punta Piedras and Montevideo, and the presence of the Barra del Indio Shoal. The hydro sedimentological model used for the simulations is a regional implementation of the Model for Applications at Regional Scale.

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