Circulation inside the Narrows of St. John's Harbor

Guo, Ming (2005) Circulation inside the Narrows of St. John's Harbor. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

St. John's harbor is located on the Northeast coast of the Avalon Peninsula on the Island of Newfoundland. During the summer and fall of 1999 and 2000, two continuous observational program were carried out in order to determine the circulation in the Narrows of the harbor and the influence of external forcing from Avalon Channel. Observational current data in both years show that the axial current in the Narrows has a two-layer vertical structure. A strong seasonal bottom outflow was found in the center of the Narrows in both years, and it keeps strongest in August and September. Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis applied to the axial subtidal currents in 2000 shows that mode 1 contains over 40% of the total variance and mode 2 contains 27% of the total variance. Coherence analysis result indicates that mode 1 represents the influence from local wind stress and mode 2 represents the effect from external force outside the harbor. Comparison between observation current and wind speed shows that wind force has a direct influence on the surface current and a counter influence on the current in the lower layer. The result of a two-layer barotropical model driven by wind forcing shows a high correlation with EOF mode 1. The counter effect of wind force on the lower layer also occurs in the model, and can be explained as the conservation of the volume in the harbor.

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