Tidal Flow Computations at a Coastal Prototype Spillway

The South Florida Water Management District (District) maintains and operates over four hundred hydraulic structures, including spillways, pump stations, culverts, and weirs. More than one hundred of these structures are gated spillways. About twenty five of these are coastal spillways. Most of the coastal spillways discharge freshwater into Biscayne Bay, an environmentally sensitive area south of Miami, Florida. Biscayne Bay has the world's third longest living reef system, and is the only reef system in the world located in proximity of a large, highly urbanized coastal area. In this paper, a model for estimating tidal flow at a prototype coastal spillway is developed based on continuous field flow measurements obtained from an Ultrasonic Velocity Meter. This model accounts for tidal effects by incorporating tidal range and period in the flow equation. This tidal flow model is compared with the traditional procedure and field flow measurements. In terms of accuracy, the developed tidal flow model resulted in significant improvements over the traditional procedure.