VERBI VEnice Research BIbliography

In the presence of multiple inlets, interactions may occur whereby hydrodynamics and sediment transport in each inlet may also be affected by variations occurring at the other inlets. Here, we report a recent investigation [Tambroni & Seminara, 2006] of the above effects, modelling Venice Lagoon as a single basin connected to the sea through three straight rectangular channels.
Results suggest that the general features of the temporal dependence of the net sand exchange and the total volume of the yearly loss of sand from Venice Lagoon are not significantly altered by inlet interactions. Hence, in the absence of an excess supply from the sea, the yearly loss of sand through Venice inlets is still an order of magnitude smaller than the total sediment loss usually claimed. We also show that, at least in the short term, this estimate is only slightly affected by the sand supply from wave resuspension in the far field whose effect is simply to store sediments in the near inlet region. This is done by modelling the flood flow in the near inlet region as a two-dimensional irrotational plane flow and coupling the hydrodynamics with the transport of suspended sediments, evaluated through the solution of an advection-diffusion equation for sand concentration.