Print PageThe Columbia River, starts in British Columbia, Canada, is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest region of North America and has the greatest flow of any North American river draining into the Pacific Ocean. Average flow at the mouth of about 265,000 cubic feet per second (7,500 m3/s),the Columbia River is the fourth-largest by volume in the U.S. Columbia River Estuary located in Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington starts in Astoria, Oregon and ends in river mile 46. The Lower Columbia River Basin includes all tributaries and their watersheds that drain into the Columbia River from its mouth to river mile 146. Restoration, habitat enhancement and habitat creation efforts are crucial within the lower Columbia River Basin and in the Estuary in order to mitigate the effects of human activities since the 1870’s Most recently, the Columbia River Channel Improvement Project, which deepened the navigation channel from 40 feet to 43 feet below the Columbia River Datum, requires Ecosystem restoration as part of the adaptive management plan.
Results/Conclusions
This poster illustrates a recently developed large scale Adaptive Hydraulics (AdH) model for the lower Columbia River and Willamette River for use as an eco-system and habitat restoration planning tool for various projects within the tidally influenced tributary of the Columbia River. Adaptive Hydraulics (AdH) is the US Army Corps of Engineers’ next generation unstructured multi-dimensional mass conserving finite element physics based hydrodynamic model code that utilizes automatic, run-time grid refinement and un-refinement to obtain the best hydrodynamic solution for the least computational cost. The hydrodynamic portion of the model code includes: shallow water equation methods for estuarine, riverine, etc. problems; Navier-Stokes (full physics) methods for calculation around structures such as fish ladders; and unsaturated ground water methods. The shallow water component includes multi-dimensional modules for: constituent transport such as salinity; modules for fine, coarse and mixed sediments with bed structure; and modules for water quality and ecological work such as ICM, CASM, and NSM. AdH is written in a library format to facilitate collaboration and the addition of new physics, water quality and ecological processes, including libraries for turbulence closure, sediment transport, friction, water quality, ecology, wave processes, and structures, among others. AdH provides decision support system to conduct “what-if” analysis involving circulation, salinity, sediment transport, water quality and ecology for project sites within estuaries during the planning phase of eco-system restoration programs.
