NATURAL PROCESSES IN AN INDUSTRIALIZED SETTING: SEDIMENTARY AND HYDRO- DYNAMICS OF THE BUFFALO RIVER, NY

The lower 9 km of the Buffalo River, which flows from the east along the southern border of Buffalo, NY before discharging at its mouth into the eastern end of Lake Erie, has been designated as a Great Lakes area of concern (AoC) due to poor water quality, degraded riparian and river habitat, and sediment contamination. Over a century of rapid industrial growth and subsequent deterioration in the area directly surrounding the river has caused its natural state to become extremely altered as it has been and continues to be manipulated to fit into a man-made setting. The current Remedial Action Plan (RAP) for this AoC centers on sediment remediation and therefore understanding the hydrodynamics and subsequent sediment transport processes within the river is key. The current understanding of the river's dynamics has been interpreted primarily from sediment movement and deposition trends via Sediment Trend Analysis (STA), side scan imaging, and three-dimensional modeling. These studies have revealed that a highly dynamic transport system within the river including both downstream and upstream flow regimes has developed due to the impact of seiche events. The development of a standing wave, known as a seiche, along the long axis of Lake Erie, initiates rapid changes in lake level causing water to be forcibly driven up into the Buffalo River channel at its mouth resulting in the creation of this unique bidirectional flow regime within the river. As the hydrodynamics of the river have primarily been reverse modeled from sediment trends, an examination of data collected by Acoustic Doppler Radar Profilers (ADCPs) greatly enhances this database of knowledge by sampling the vertical water column and horizontal cross-section velocities of the river in multiple strategic locations at short time intervals of 30 minutes or less over an extended period of time. This hydrologic data, in collaboration with other databases including the aforementioned studies as well as concurrently collected measurements of temperature, meteorological, lake level, and updated side-scan survey imaging data, reveals new trends and creates a more comprehensive image of this dynamic setting which may enhance our ability to efficiently remediate this AoC as well as other similarly affected areas in the future.