Intertidal motion within a small lagoon

Monitoring and the Shallow Water Equations have been applied to the hydrodynamic study of a one km² lagoon in NW Sardinia, Italy. The study of the lagoon is useful in order to guarantee that the water would be suitable for fish farm management. An Alternating Direction Implicit Method with Finite Difference Schemes is used to solve the SWE, coupled with the concentration equation. The Eulerian-Lagrangian method to discretize the convective and diffusive terms is adopted. The flow field inside the lagoon and on the sea ward side has been studied using a computational domain made up of a mesh of square cells measuring six meters across and a time step of 15 seconds. An analysis of the sensitivity and calibration of the model was carried out. The friction coefficient and the depth-averaged turbulent kinetic have been evaluated by comparison with the collected field data.