Abstract. We present a test case of river plume spreading to evaluate numerical methods used in coastal ocean modeling. The main characteristics of the plume dynamics are predicted analytically, but are difficult to reproduce numerically because of numerical mixing present in the models. Our test case reveals the level of numerical mixing as well as the ability of models to reproduce nonlinear processes and frontal zone dynamics. We propose an analysis of simulated plume spreading which may be useful in more general studies of plume dynamics. The major result of our comparative study is that accuracy in reproducing the analytical solution depends less on the type of applied model architecture or numerical grid than it does on the type of advection scheme.
Plume spreading test case for coastal ocean models
