Abstract
The Missouri-Mississippi River System has a length of 4,200 miles, a drainage area of 1,240,000 square miles and an average discharge rate of 551,000 cubic feet per second. In the order of these indices, it ranks first, third and sixth respectively among the world's rivers. In the past, physical oceanography investigations in the Mississippi Delta area have concentrated primarily on specific phenomena in limited areas. No known attempt has been made to treat river discharge in the ocean as a dynamic system having mean variations in its physical properties. This investigation provides a tentative description of mean seasonal and monthly outflow patterns together with an analysis of the factors that shape them. Pertinent historical and contemporary data are limited and this effort is only a first approximation of actual conditions. It is shown that averaging of several years' data can provide acceptable working values of the pertinent properties such as river outflow, wind field, sea surface temperature, etc. Support for this study has come from a NASA sponsored investigation into the use of remote sensors for oceanography. Because the Mississippi outflow area offers large sea surface contrasts in temperature, salinity and color it was chosen as a test site for sensor evaluation. The sensors were flown in NASA aircraft and included infrared imagers, ultraviolet imagers and various cameras. Remote sensors "see" only surface features, therefore, emphasis put on determining their location, extent and characteristics. ...
Walsh, Don (1968). The Mississippi River outflow, its seasonal variations and its surface characteristics. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Texas A&M University. Libraries. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /DISSERTATIONS -172987.