Effects of discretization scheme on the numerical modeling of 3D Rhone River plume dynamics are investigated. A higher order scheme of total variation diminishing (TVD) type is used to discretize advection terms of both momentum and scalar equations. It is shown that this scheme widely damps the numerical diffusion and improves the representation of the dynamical and density fronts bounding the flow. It enables to accurately investigate the effects of the turbulent diffusion, which was previously masked by the numerical one. Numerical results are also compared to in situ data for two situations related to different wind conditions. For the case without wind stress, associated to supercritical values of the Richardson number, optimized turbulent... |