San Francisco Bay Sediment and Hydrodynamic Model

On January 19, 2007 a monitoring and modeling workshop regarding San Francisco Bay was conducted by the Coastal Ocean Currents Monitoring Program, NOAA, and the South Bay Salt Pond (SBSP) Restoration Project. The workshop was well-attended by a wide array of coastal and San Francisco Bay researchers and managers.

The two highest priority actions identified at that meeting were:

• the development of an open source, flexible, three-dimensional hydrodynamic and sediment transport model
• Development of an ensemble of models as needed to address the broad array of management questions regarding San Francisco Bay.

In June 2007, the OPC and the Conservancy approved $858,000 of Proposition 50 funds to U.C. Berkeley and Stanford University to accomplish the first of these priority actions and begin accomplishment of the second through the development of a SUNTANS model (Stanford Unstructured Nonhydrostatic Terrain-Following Adaptive Navier-Stokes Simulator, Fringer et al., 2005). The model will be used to predict how restoration actions in San Francisco Bay will interact with the existing estuarine system, including changes in local tidal dynamics, salinity and suspended sediment concentrations.

Council Documents

Staff Recommendation (June 2007)