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Abstract

Coastal tidal currents play an important role to disperse the warm waters outlet from cooling system of a nuclear power plant (NPP). The modern technique of ship-board acoustic Doppler current profiler (SB-ADCP) was intensively applied to scan the current fields around the three NPPs at northern Taiwan. Sophisticated data processing provides time series of synoptic flow charts of vectors in grids associated with streamlines, allowing the visualization of how the bay like coastline input its boundary layer effect to the current field. The generation of cyclonic or anti-cyclonic vortices inside the bay in flood or ebb tide and their migration to out of the bay later on to participate the alternation of the tidal currents are remarkably observed. The difference among the three bay-like coasts or bottom topography in shape or size should be the main cause to the different behaviors of their vortices, emphasizing the variety of the dynamic backgrounds for the environmental studies upon the thermal plumes.

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