Simulation of suspended substance dispersion on the ocean shelf: Effective hydraulic coarseness of polydisperse suspension

Suspended substance dispersion in a water body is simulated in the case when the spread area is considerably larger than the depth of the water body. It is shown that, even if vertical turbulent exchange has a large effect, the problem of computing the evolution of polydisperse suspended pollutants produced by an instantaneous point source can be reduced to the integration of a few one-dimensional evolution problems and to the solution of one two-dimensional problem. This result can be used to design efficient solution methods for the practically important problem of computing the dispersion of a suspension produced by a time-continuous and/or spatially distributed source of water pollution.