Measuring hydrodynamics and sediment transport processes in the Dee estuary

The capability of monitoring and predicting the marine environment leads to a more sustainable development of coastal and offshore regions. Therefore, the continuous measurement of environmental processes become an important source of information. The present paper shows data collected during 6 years, and in particular during 2008, in the Dee Estuary. The data aims to improve the observations of the mobile sediments in coastal areas and its forcing hydrodynamics and turbulence. Data involves the deployment of instrumented rigs measuring sediment in suspension, currents, waves, sea level, sediment size and bedforms as well as cruise work including grab sampling, CTD profiles and side-scan sonar. The data covers flood and ebb tides during spring and neap periods with moderate and mild wave events, thus, having a good coverage of the processes needed to improve knowledge of sediment transport and the parameterizations used in numerical modelling. The data, in raw and treated, is being banked at BODC (British Oceanographic Data Centre, http://www.bodc.ac.uk/) which is the formal British organization for looking after and distributing data concerning the marine environment.