San Francisco Bay

Summary

San Francisco Bay is a large tidal estuary in the U.S. state of California, and gives its name to the San Francisco Bay Area. It is dominated by the cities of San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. San Francisco Bay drains water from approximately 40 percent of California. Water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, and from the Sierra Nevada mountains, flow into Suisun Bay, which then travels through the Carquinez Strait to meet with the Napa River at the entrance to San Pablo Bay, which connects at its south end to San Francisco Bay. It then connects to the Pacific Ocean via the Golden Gate strait. However, this entire group of interconnected bays is often called the San Francisco Bay. The bay was designated a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance on February 2, 2013. Size The bay covers somewhere between , depending on which sub-bays (such as San Pablo Bay), estuaries, wetlands, and so on are included in the measurement. The main part of the bay measures wide

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay

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Decadal shoreline erosion and recovery of beaches in modified and natural estuaries

Vincent Henri De Staercke

Sandy beaches in estuaries and bays (BEBs) are common landforms on the coasts of many major cities. They exist under a wide range of settings and their morphology is controlled by their distance from the estuary/bay entrance, exposure to different types of waves (e.g., ocean swells vs locally generated wind waves), proximity to flood-tide delta/shoals, and anthropogenic interventions (e.g., dredging, groynes). Both swell waves propagating into estuaries/bays and locally generated wind waves can erode BEBs. However, more understanding of BEB storm erosion and recovery over decadal timescales is needed, as they typically respond slower than open coast beaches. Here we present decadal shoreline behaviours of nine BEBs from two estuarine systems in SE Australia are presented in this study, using 76 years of aerial imagery (1941-2017). We quantify and compare decadal behaviour between beaches, developing a new typology of BEBs based on shoreline evolution. We identify four decadal behaviours: prograding, quasi-stable, retreating and storm relict - and assess the influence of flood-tide deltas, river mouths, distance from the ocean entrance, and anthropogenic interventions. Swell-exposed BEBs near the entrance are quasi stable and recover after storms at rates comparable with open coast beaches (

ELSEVIER2021

Exploring the energy use drivers of 10 cities at microscale level

Aristide Henri Roger Athanassiadis, Franziska Meinherz, João Vitor Meirelles de Miranda

Cities are responsible for the predominant share of anthropogenic environmental pressures. Recently, consistent methodologies to measure the metabolism of cities have been developed in order to enhance comparability between case studies and enable cross-city comparisons at the macro-scale. This comparison illustrated potential factors and drivers explaining macro-scale differences between cities. However, such studies rely on very few data points and look at cities as homogenous entities omitting their complex functioning. When looking at the relationships between urban characteristics and metabolic flows at smaller spatial scales, drivers appear to be different than in macroscopic analyses, pointing towards the importance of taking microscale urban heterogeneity into account. The aim of this paper is to improve our understanding of these effects by analyzing the relationship between energy use and various urban indicators at a microscale level for ten cities (Brussels, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Chicago, Glasgow, London, Los Angeles, Milan, New York City and San Francisco).

Elsevier2017

We propose a method of automatic extraction of the tidal channel network from topographic data of marsh and tidal flat lands that uses a combination of a threshold elevation and threshold curvature. Not only the location but also the area of the channel bed is identified. This method differs substantially from that used to identify terrestrial channel networks, and it successfully predicts all of the main channels and nearly all of the smaller tributaries of the channel networks derived from SPOT imagery of the northern Venice Lagoon. Channel network maps of Venice and other sites (Petaluma Marsh in the San Francisco Bay and Barnstable Marsh in Massachusetts) were examined for scaling properties. Because of the large width of the channels relative to a characteristic length of their drainage area, we had to develop procedures for automatically delineating channel width and then for identifying the skeleton of the channel network (the pattern connecting the loci of the channel centerlines) for box-counting analysis. Box-counting dimensions of the network skeleton proved site-dependent and showed finite-size effects. Because of the large widths we also performed a scaling analysis based on the proportions of the total channel bed area occupied by the tidal networks (i.e., a 'fat' fractal analysis). This analysis showed a strong break in scaling between large and small channels. These analyses suggest that tidal channels differ significantly in their scaling relationships from terrestrial systems. In subsequent papers [Rinaldo et al., this issue (a), (b)] we pursue this point much further.

1999