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TESTING LINKAGES BETWEEN GROUNDWATER, WATERSHED, AND IN-STREAM MODELS IN THE CONTENTNEA CREEK BASIN, NORTH CAROLINA, USA
Citation:
Kraemer, S R., E J. Hayter, AND M J. Cyterski. TESTING LINKAGES BETWEEN GROUNDWATER, WATERSHED, AND IN-STREAM MODELS IN THE CONTENTNEA CREEK BASIN, NORTH CAROLINA, USA. Presented at 2000 Annual Meeting and International Conference of the American Institute of Hydrology, Research Triangle Park, NC, November 5-8, 2000.
Impact/Purpose:
Develop, test, and refine models to evaluate sub-basins to determine whether local water quality problems due to excessive nutrient loading exist, and if so, to characterize them and determine their relationships to nutrient loading. Develop models to simulate overland flow and non-point source pollutant loads to track and assess nutrient loadings across watersheds and provide approaches for estimating nutrient budgets within sub-basins and for predicting changes in nutrient budgets in response to changes in watershed activities/land use/land cover. Demonstrate the application of the recommended approach/models for predicting changes in nutrient budgets in response to changes in proposed watershed activities/land use/land cover, resulting in specific recommendations for reducing the nutrient loads to a basin. For coherence, cooperation, and economics, these models will be housed in a unified, consistent, computational environment for environmental analyses that allows teaching (i.e., technology transfer) to multiple users (users concentrate on problem, not model input/output); that appeals to multi-disciplinary groups for distribution and use as a consistent assessment methodology (includes models, tools, modular design and facilitated updates of science/engineering); that includes resident visualization, animation tools, documentation and tutorials on-line, hooks to GIS and environmental databases; and is executable on UNIX, personal computers, and HPC resources.
Objective # 2.2 Conserve and enhance nation's waters: By 2005, conserve and enhance the ecological health of the nation's (state, interstate, and tribal) waters and aquatic ecosystems-rivers and streams, lakes, wetlands, estuaries, coastal areas, oceans, and groundwater-so that 75% of waters will support healthy aquatic communities.
Description:
Computer modeling provides support for the development of TMDLs (total maximum daily loads) of impaired water bodies. Evaluations of TMDLs for nutrients, especially for nitrogen, benefits from a multi-media assessment (i.e., atmosphere, landscape, subsurface, surface water). In this paper, we evaluate the linkage of a watershed model, subsurface models, and an in-stream model to represent the hydrology/hydraulics of catchments within the Contentnea Creek basin in North Carolina. We represent the subsurface hydrology using the models GFLOW (www.gfiow.com) and MODFLOW (water.usgs.gov/software/rnodflow-96.html). We represent the watershed hydrology using HSPF-Hydrologic Simulation Program Fortran (www.epa.gov/docs/ostwater/BASINS/index.html). We represent the in-stream hyraulics using the EFDC-Environmental Fluid Dynamics Code (Harmick, 1996). Each separate media model supplies additional boundary conditions and calibration targets for the other models through water balance and flux exchanges. The strategy for evaluating sediment and nutrient water quality modeling will be discussed. The evaluation of the linked models provides a foundation for future developments of either fully coupled systems or comprehensive multi-media models.