Abstract

TORRES-MOTA, Rogelio; SALLES-AFONSO-DE-ALMEIDA, Paulo  and  LOPEZ-GONZALEZ, José. Effects of Increased Sea Levels from Climate Change on the Celestún Estuary Morphology. Tecnol. cienc. agua [online]. 2014, vol.5, n.5, pp.5-20. ISSN 2007-2422.

This work evaluates the effect of potential increases in mean sea levels on the morphology of a lagoon system using a stability analysis of the lagoon's inlet with the sea. To this end, the study was divided into two phases: a) obtaining the maritime climate through a time-series resulting from a historical retro-analysis to identify the main oceanographic parameters, complemented with an analysis of data measured in situ to characterize the current hydrodynamics of the lagoon system and b) modeling the hydrodynamic response of the estuary for two scenarios for increased sea levels (25 and 50 cm) based on studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with an emphasis on changes in flow systems, currents and tides, sediment transport capacity and tidal distortion. The results of the present work show that maximum flow velocities through the lagoon inlet increased 18 and 29% over the current condition for each scenario modeled. In addition to variations in flow and ebb duration, this suggested that the Celestún coastal system has the adaptive capacity to maintain a certain degree of morphological equilibrium for a given mean increase in sea levels. Net sediment transport does not only depend on the direction of the residual current but also on the distortion in velocity fields and in maximum flow and ebb velocity values.

Keywords : Increase in mean sea level; lagoon coast; lagoon inlet stability; sea flow and ebb; tidal distortion.

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