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Engineering design is a decision-making process. Optimization techniques can be used to insure that better decisions are made. One design of great interest to engineers is that of high-velocity channels used for routing floodwater out of urban areas. In the design of these channels it is very important to avoid such hydraulic phenomena as standing waves, hydraulic jumps, and shocks. These will require higher wall heights and more expense. These channels can be modeled with physical models, but they are expensive and time consuming. To minimize the cost of building and changing the physical models and the time required to perform the study, an automated numerical model can be used to test a range of designs before construction of the physical model. The resulting design can be used as an initial design, which is close to the desired design requiring fewer changes to the physical model, saving time and money.

The Mississippi Sound is underlain by late Pleistocene aged sediments of the Biloxi, Prairie, and Gulfport Formations topped by an erosional unconformity, which was an exposed land surface during the sea level low-stand of the last glacial maximum. During that period, rivers and streams draining upland watersheds cut across the exposed coastal plain incising a network of distributary fluvial channels. Subsequent sea level rise covered the incised drainage network with a relatively thin (10-20 m) layer of reworked Holocene aged sediments. Here, an extensive database of archived and newly collected seismic reflection profile data, as well as archived core data, is analyzed to map the paleotopography and the paleo-drainage network of the Pleistocene-Holocene unconformity surface beneath the western Mississippi Sound. Approximately 255 km of seismic data was acquired with a 2-16 kHz chirp sub-bottom profiling sonar. Additionally, 978 km of seismic data was accessed through a United States Geological Survey archive along with over 20 historical cores. Results indicate that the Pleistocene-Holocene unconformity under the western Mississippi Sound is gently dipping to the southeast (<0.05°) and contains a complex network of incised paleofluvial channels with relief ranging from 5-10 m and widths ranging from 0.3–2 km. A conceptual model for paleo-channel incision and infilling as well as modern analogue depositional environments are presented.

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No description available.