Diagnostic analysis of estuarine residence times

Residence times are a conceptually important indicator of the ecological behavior and self-cleaning capacity of estuaries. An approach is proposed that accounts for residence times variability. Unlike more traditional methods, the proposed approach does not require scaling with regard to a main riverine source, hence extending the range of applicability to problems involving non-point sources and to systems such as lagoons. The proposed approach is based on very accurate numerical tracking of large number of particles, carefully distributed over the domain, and released several times within a tidal cycle and within neap/spring cycles.