Low-salinity plume detachment under non-uniform summer wind off the Changjiang Estuary

In the past, two physical mechanisms, baroclinic instability (BI) and strong asymmetric tidal mixing (SATM) during the spring tidal period, were proposed for the offshore detachment of the low-salinity plume over the inner shelf of the East China Sea (ECS). These two mechanisms were re-examined using both observations and a fully three-dimensional (3-D), high-resolution, unstructured-grid, free-surface, primitive-equation, Finite-Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM). The observed currents and salinities showed that the plume was characterized by a two-layer system, in which the upper layer is mainly driven by the river discharge-induced buoyancy flow and the lower layer is predominantly controlled by tidal mixing and rectification. The SATM mechanism was based on the model run without calibration against observed currents and salinity around the plume region, so that it should be applied with caution to a realistic condition observed on the inner shelf of the ECS. The BI mechanism was derived under a condition without consideration of tidal mixing. Although BI could still occur along the frontal zone when tides were included, it was unable to produce a single, large, detached low-salinity lens observed on the inner shelf of the ECS. The process-oriented model experiment results suggest that for a given river discharge and realistic tidal flow, the spatially non-uniform southwesterly surface wind during the southeast monsoon-dominant summer could increase frontal spatial variability and thus produce a significant offshore detachment of low-salinity water on the inner shelf of East China Sea.