AIMS eReefs
Total Suspended Solids, dust, mud carbonate & mud mineral (GBR4 BGC v3.1 baseline)
Note: The near-real time GBR1 and GBR4 models (including hydro, river tracer and BGC) are currently paused at December 17th 2023 due to infrastructure damage from the recent flooding events around the Daintree River region (see here). These floods have damaged the real-time river temperature and flow sensors across surrounding catchments, and Queensland government is working to recover and restore these as quickly as possible. We will provide further updates when available.
The sediment is modelled in multiple layers with a thin layer of easily resuspendable material overlying thicker layers of more consolidated sediment. The sediment model contains inorganic particles of different size (Dust, Mud, Sand and Gravel) and different mineralogies (carbonate and non-carbonate). The critical shear stress for resuspension, and the sinking rates, are generally larger for large particles, while and mineralogy only affects the optical properties. The size-class Dust comes only in a non-carbonate mineralogy, and the Mud-carbonate class contains a category of FineSed-mineral that has the same physical and optical properties as Mud-mineral, except that it is initialised with a zero value and only enters the domain from rivers.
Total Suspended Solids
This is the sum of the suspended sediments in the water column. It is [Fine sediment] + [Mud] + [Mud carbonate] + [Mud mineral] + [Dust]. Suspended sediment is often measured in mg / L. To convert between the model units (kg / m3) and typical units (mg / L), multiply the values by 1000, so 0.005 kg / m3 = 5 mg / L.
Dust
Very fine terrestrial sediment (nominal size 1 µm) released from the catchments via the rivers. It has a sinking velocity of 1 m d-1. This fine particle size is intended to model fine particles that are distributed in flood plumes.
Mud carbonate
Small sized (nominal size 30 µm), re-suspending particles with a sinking velocity of 17 m d-1. This sediment is white in colour.
Mud mineral
Small sized (nominal size 30 µm), re-suspending particles with a sinking velocity of 17 m d-1. This sediment is brown in colour.