Philippe BONNETON
DR CNRS, Research team METHYS/EPOC, Université de Bordeaux
https://www.epoc.u-bordeaux.fr/indiv/bonneton/

“Tidal bore dynamics in estuaries”

A tidal bore is a sudden elevation of the water surface that travels upstream an estuary with the incoming flood tide. The formation and dynamics of this spectacular and fascinating phenomenon bring into play nonlinear wave interactions over a large range of spatiotemporal scales. A tidal bore is a small-scale estuarine process with scales of variation of order few seconds in time and dozen meters in space. This small-scale process, which generally occurs in the upper estuary, results from the nonlinear transformation of the tidal wave over long distance (several dozen of kilometers) and long period of time (several hours). The general bore phenomenon has been extensively studied in fluid mechanics and mathematics. On the other hand, the large-scale mechanisms which control tidal bore formation has so far received little attention. In this presentation we will analyze tidal bore formation from a unique long term database acquired during 4 campaigns in the two main French tidal-bore estuaries: the Seine and Gironde/Garonne estuaries. We will show that the tidal bore intensity is mainly governed by the dimensionless tidal range, which characterizes the local tidal wave nonlinearity. We will also show that the undular bore structure can be explained by two different wave processes depending on the bore intensity.