HR: 1340h
AN: OS13A-0514    [Abstracts]
TI: Dispersal Scaling from the World's Rivers
AU: Fong, D A
EM: dfong@stanford.edu
AF: Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94304 United States
AU: * Warrick, J A
EM: korzech@usgs.gov
AF: Coastal and Marine Geology, USGS, Pacific Science Center 400 Natural Bridges Drive, Santa Cruz, CA 95060 United States
AB: Although rivers provide important biogeochemical inputs to oceans, there are currently no descriptive or predictive relationships of the spatial scales of these river influences. Our combined satellite, laboratory, field and modeling results show that the coastal dispersal areas of small, mountainous rivers exhibit remarkable self-similar scaling relationships over many orders of magnitude. River plume areas scale with source drainage area to a power significantly less than one (average = 0.65), and this power relationship decreases significantly with distance offshore of the river mouth. Observations of plumes from large rivers reveal that this scaling continues over six orders of magnitude of river drainage basin areas. This suggests that the cumulative area of coastal influence for many of the smallest rivers of the world is greater than that of single rivers of equal watershed size, implying that the cumulative biogeochemical effects of many very small rivers would extend over larger areas of coastal waters than would the effects of one large river. We suggest that future investigations of fluvial inputs to the world's ocean focus on the timing and processes of dispersal from small, mountainous rivers to evaluate the applicability of our results to these important coastal settings.
DE: 4235 Estuarine processes
DE: 4299 General or miscellaneous
DE: 4528 Fronts and jets
DE: 1860 Runoff and streamflow
SC: Ocean Sciences [OS]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting