Abstract:
Water exchange matrix is an efficient tool to study the water exchange among sub-areas in large-scale bays. The application of random walk method to calculate water exchange matrix was studied. Compared against the advection-diffusion model, the random walk model is more flexible to calculate the water exchange matrix. The forecast matrix suggested by Thompson was applied to evaluate the water exchange characteristics among the sub-areas fast. According to theoretic analysis, it is found that the precision of the predicted results is mainly affected by three factors, namely the particle number, the generated time of the forecast matrix and the number of the sub-areas. The impact of the above factors was analyzed based on the results of a series of numerical tests. The results show that the precision of the forecast matrix increases with the increase of generated time of the forecast matrix and the number of the particles. If there are enough particles in each sub-area, the precision of the forecast matrix will increase with the number of the sub-areas. On the other hand, if the particles in each sub-area are not enough, excessive number of sub-areas may result in the decrease of the precision of the forecast matrix.