Three-dimensional Arabian Gulf Hydro-Environmental Modeling using Delft3D.

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Tanuspong Pokavanich, Yousef Alosairi, Reimer de Graaff, Robin Morelissen, Wilbert Vergruggen, Kholood Al-Rifaie, Taqi Altaf, Turki Al-Said

Thursday 2 july 2015

14:05 - 14:20h at Asia (level 0)

Themes: (T) Hydro-environment, (ST) Ecohydraulics and ecohydrology

Parallel session: 12G. Environment - Impact

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The Arabian Gulf (AG) is a semi-enclosed shallow water body surrounded by countries having extreme desertic weather conditions, having the largest coastal developments in the world, seafront industry including the world’s largest power and desalination plants. The AG is facing water quality deterioration from multifaceted stresses, occurring naturally from its poor exchange with the outer sea, as well as cumulative anthropogenic stresses. There is very limited systematic monitoring, knowledge sharing, integrated and cumulative impacts studies and planning for coastal development by the AG surrounded countries. One of the reasons is the absence of generally integrated and holistic tools with which the physical processes and cumulative impacts in the AG can be studied. The objective of this study is to develop a numerical tool to promote better studies and integrated planning among the surrounded countries. This paper presents the development of a three-dimensional hydro-environmental numerical model for the AG using a coupled hydrodynamic model (Delft3D-FLOW) with a biochemical model (Delft3D-WAQ). The coupled model is driven by realistic forcing boundary data derived from different sources e.g., ECMWF ERA-Interim spatial weather data, water temperature and salinity profile timeseries from MyOcean model. The model is validated against field measured data in Kuwait waters. The results of the three-dimensional model will be used to characterize the hydrodynamics and the biochemical features of the AG with a special focus in Kuwait waters. The model will be useful to study cumulative impacts in the entire AG, but can also be applied to generate boundary data for local simulation models for future projects. It is planned to establish an internet forum to advertise existences of the model and promote its usage at the end of the project.