Astronomical Tide and Typhoon-Induced Storm Surge in Hangzhou Bay, China

Abstract

The Hangzhou Bay, located at the East of China, is widely known for having one of the world’s largest tidal bores. It is connected with the Qiantang River and the Eastern China Sea, and contains lots of small islands collectively referred as Zhoushan Islands (see Figure 1). The estuary mouth of the Hangzhou Bay is about 100 km wide; however, the head of bay (Ganpu) which is 86 km away from estuary mouth is significantly narrowed to only 21 km wide. The tide in the Hangzhou Bay is an anomalistic semidiurnal tide due to the irregular geometrical shape and shallow depth and is mainly controlled by the M2 harmonic constituent. The M2 tidal constituent has a period about 12 hours and 25.2 minutes, exactly half a tidal lunar day. The Hangzhou Bay faces frequent threats from tropical cyclones and suffers a massive damage from its resulting strong wind, storm surge and inland flooding. According to the 1949-2008 statistics, about 3.5 typhoons occur in this area every year. When typhoon generated in tropic open sea moves towards the estuary mouth, lower atmospheric pressure in the typhoon center causes a relatively high water elevation in adjacent area and strong surface wind pushes huge volume of seawater into the estuary, making water elevation in the Hangzhou Bay significantly increase. As a result, the typhoon-induced external forces (wind stress and pressure deficit) above sea surface make the tidal hydrodynamics in the Hangzhou Bay further complicated. In the recent years, some researches have been done to study the tidal hydrodynamics in the Hangzhou Bay and its adjacent areas. For example, Hu et al. (2000) simulated the current field in the Hangzhou Bay based on a 2D model, and their simulated surface elevation and current field preferably compared with the field observations. Su et al. (2001), Pan et al. (2007) and Wang (2009) numerically investigate the formulation, propagation and dissipation of the tidal bore at the head of Hangzhou Bay. Also, Cao & Zhu (2000), Xie et al. (2007), Hu et al. (2007) and Guo et al. (2009) performed numerical simulation to study the typhoon-induced 9