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EVALUATION OF THE STATE-OF-THE-ART CONTAMINATED SEDIMENT TRANSPORT AND FATE MODELING SYSTEM
Citation:
HAYTER, E. J. EVALUATION OF THE STATE-OF-THE-ART CONTAMINATED SEDIMENT TRANSPORT AND FATE MODELING SYSTEM. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-06/108 (NTIS PB2007-100141), 2006.
Impact/Purpose:
The objective of this task is to develop, support and transfer a wide variety of tools and mathematical models that can be used to support watershed and water quality protection programs in support of OW, OSWER, and the Regions.
Description:
Modeling approaches for evaluating the transport and fate of sediment and associated contaminants are briefly reviewed. The main emphasis is on: 1) the application of EFDC (Environmental Fluid Dynamics Code), the state-of-the-art contaminated sediment transport and fate public domain modeling system, to a 19-mile reach of the Housatonic River, MA; and 2) the evaluation of a 15-year simulation of sediment and PCB transport and fate in this 19-mile reach. The development of EFDC has been supported by Regions 1 and 4, the Office of Water, the Office of Superfund Remediation Technology Innovation (OSRTI), and the Office of Research and Development (ORD) - NERL/ERD. EFDC is currently being used at the following Superfund sites: Housatonic River, MA; Kalamazoo River, MI; Lower Duwamish Waterway, WA; and Portland Harbor, OR. The evaluation of the modeling results showed that EFDC is capable of simulating the transport and resultant concentrations of TSS and PCBs in this reach of the Housatonic River within specified model performance measures. Specifically, a statistical summary of the performance of the EFDC model for TSS and PCB concentrations found that the relative bias at the downstream boundary of the model domain (i.e., Rising Pond dam) is well within the model performance measure of ± 30% for TSS (-11.93%) and just outside the measure for PCB concentrations (-31.97%). For median relative error, the model performance measure is also ± 30%, and the EFDC model is within the performance measure for both TSS (-27.12%) and PCB (-3.32%) concentrations. Considering the fact that the model was only minimally calibrated, and that the system modeled had widely varying hydraulic and morphologic regimes, the EFDC model's performance, as quantified by relative bias and median relative errors, is considered good. This demonstrates that EFDC is a robust modeling system that can be successfully implemented at other contaminated sediment sites.