Examples of the Indian River Lagoon

Numerical Fluid Dynamic Model's Processed Output

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Below are examples of both surface and bottom plots generated from the Indian River Lagoon Numerical Model run for the summer of 1995. The time step below, from Julian day 220 (August 8, 1995), shows an unusually large increase in fresh water entering the Indian River Lagoon from the Sebastian River. This has been correlated to increased rainfall due to Hurricane Erin, which hit Brevard and Indian River counties on August 2, 1995. Dr. Gary Zarillo and his research team at Florida Tech's Division of Marine and Environmental Systems have produced model runs and plotted output for the summers of 1994 and 1995. This particular output was processed using Tecplot Software. The vectors represent current velocity, the size of the vector arrows being proportional to the magnitude of the current, and the contours represent salinity in parts per thousand (see legend).

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Julian Day 220 - surface


Julian Day 220 - Bottom

Here's an animation of the surface from July 19, 1995 - August 8, 1995 in raster metafile (*.rm) format (This may take a while to download). The animation of the bottom layer of the same time period is available here. The animations may be viewed using Tecplot Framer, which may be downloaded here (This takes less than 30 seconds in most cases, and it is ready to open *.rm files immediately). The tidal flushing through Sebastian Inlet (the bottleneck on the right) is very evident from the large velocity vectors there.