Venice: Sea-Lagoon Exchange in a Modified Tide Regime
Ottavio Vittori 1 and
Francesco Tampieri 2
1 Director at the Laboratorio per Io Studio della Dinamica delle Grandi Masse, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, in Venice. Professor of atmospheric physics at the Physics Institute of the University of Bologna
2 Researcher at the Laboratorio per Io Studio della Dinamica delle Grandi Masse, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, in Venice
Salinity and tide heights recorded for a month at P0, a point in the northern section of the Venetian lagoon, are the basic experimental data used to construct a numerical model which describes the salinity variations at P0 as a function of the tides measured at the Lido entrance. The time variation of the salinity pattern iss interpreted in terms of a lagoon system in which a freshwater source of constant intensity is in a quasi-steady equilibrium with a tide-modulated sink. The mean residence time of a contaminant in this simulated lagoon is predicted from the change in the salinity pattern due to a reduction in the entrance size.
