10.18453/rosdok_id00005651 Reese, Lloyd Lloyd Reese http://d-nb.info/gnd/1405101938 https://orcid.org/0009-0007-3481-7165 Universität Rostock 2025 530 Physics 2025 en https://purl.uni-rostock.de/rosdok/id00005651 urn:nbn:de:gbv:28-rosdok_id00005651-8 Estuaries are water bodies with a marine salt water inflow that mixes with terrestrial fresh water to form a brackish outflow. The role of mixing for this circulation was not yet sufficiently studied for realistic cases, where idealised studies might not hold. Here, the full chain of relations from instantaneous, local processes to the tidally averaged, estuary-wide circulation was studied using numerical simulations of a realistic tidal estuary, revealing a complex pattern of local mixing processes which, however, resulted in a subtidal estuary-wide circulation close to the idealised theory.