Customer Reviews

Estuaries: Monitoring and Modeling the Physical System

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This brief text of 157 pages is a general introduction to estuaries which assumes no previous knowledge of oceonography, for example it devotes 12 pages to the general theory of tides, and many other pages to cursury descriptions of instruments used by all oceanographers. It would be suitable for a beginning student, but has limited appeal to the specialist in estuaries.

The Humber Estuary, on the east coast of Northern England, is the main subject of the narative, with only fleeting references to other types of estuaries. The author describes several numerical models of various paramenters of this estuary, implimented using the Excel spreadsheet application. Since Excel is almost universally availble, this adds a nice quantitative component to the book. However, the author describes the implimentation of the modeling in exasperating detail, describing each key stroke for example after example. This is not good way to teach, and it fills up many pages of an already short essay.

I cannot overstate my disappointment after reviewing this book. There is no new material that you cannot find in other references. Theoretical presentations about the methods that are used in the model are very simplistic or non-existent. "How-to" explanations are cryptic and obscure. The spreadsheet "model" is very limited and the VBA program is closed to users, so you can not see how the author implemented the formulas. There are numerous necessary MS-Excel screen shots of almost empty screens that add nothing to the explanations. One of them (Fig. 4.1) is an empty MS-Excel sheet!!

Do not waste your money like I did. There are far better options out there.