Three Dimensional Aspects of Shallow-Water Island Wakes

Deborah R. Cox and Jason H. Middleton
University of New South Wales, Australia

Field observations and satellite imagery have shown that island wakes have important implications for mixing, sediment transport and the distribution of biological species. While laboratory experiments and numerical modeling of the flow around hills and structures such as buildings and piers have shown that the wakes produced are complex and strongly three dimensional, there has been limited investigation of the three dimensional structure of island wakes. This paper will present some preliminary results of three dimensional numerical simulations (using ROMS) of the wakes for different island shapes and incident flow profiles.