CAREER: Dynamic Water Transport Timescales: Quantifying Hydrodynamic Responses to Perturbations Across Time and Space in a River Delta

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Surface water movement through coastal environments is controlled by both marine and terrestrial processes, which yields complicated patterns of water circulation that vary through time and space. The time it takes for water to move through an environment is often used as an important estimator of water quality and ecosystem health. In river deltas, this is complicated by the presence of deep, fast-moving water in channels that is connected to slow, shallow moving water in vegetated wetlands. It is important to understand how water transport times in river deltas evolve over time because of the considerable interest in using natural deltaic land-building processes for coastal restoration. This project investigates these issues using field work in coastal Louisiana and computer simulations of water movement in growing river deltas. An educational plan builds on these themes by training university students using innovative field measurements for coastal hydrology, integrating coastal hydrology research into undergraduate and graduate coursework, and engaging K-8 students with demonstrations, guided research projects, and field trips. River deltas are highly dynamic ecosystems with complicated hydrology that are of significant societal and environmental importance. This research addresses an urgent need in hydrology to understand how hydrological processes evolve in non-stationary ecosystems using numerical modeling, field observations, and graph theory. The project will develop the concept of Dynamic Water Transport Timescales and establish a framework for quantifying how changes to delta morphology and hydrodynamics impact water transport time. Fundamental questions will be addressed concerning the impacts of multi-decadal morphodynamic change on short-term hydrological transport in river deltas, the surface water responses to internal and external perturbations across time and space, and the links between deltaic channel network structure and water transport times. This award is co-funded by the Hydrologic Sciences program and the Education & Human Resources program in the Division of Earth Sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.