ABSTRACT
Driven by the prevailing south wind in summer, floating mat-like algal blooms in the open area of Taihu Lake would drift into Meiliang Bay located in the northern part of Taihu Lake. An exponential relationship between wind speed and algal drift velocity was found through controlled flume experiments and field observations. Then the relationship was applied to compute drift importation into Meiliang Bay in six dates when mat-like algal blooms were happening. During the six dates, except on 2004-07-31 the algal boom drifted outwards from Meiliang Bay with slight amounts of 0.05 km2; for the rest of dates, the importations were inwards positive, the maximum importation occurred on 2004-06-11, being 17.4 km2, and the minimum importation on 2004-07-30, being 4.8 km2; The results indicated importation of wind-driven algae drift during 24 hours accounts for 3.7% - 13.3% of the area of Meiliang Bay.
