You are here:
Simulating Toxicant Concentrations in Surface Waters and Sediments: Advances in the Water Quality Analysis Simulation Program (WASP8)
Citation:
Knightes, Chris, B. Avant, Y. Han, R. Zepp, D. Bouchard, Brad Acrey, T. Wool, AND R. Ambrose. Simulating Toxicant Concentrations in Surface Waters and Sediments: Advances in the Water Quality Analysis Simulation Program (WASP8). iEMSs 2018, Fort Collins, CO, June 24 - 28, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
WASP8 is publicly available online at https://www.epa.gov/ceam/water-quality-analysis-simulation-program-wasp with documentation, tutorials, and example files available. The Advanced Toxicant module has been completely rewritten and restructured, these improvements provide opportunity for simulating a range of environmental contaminants.
Description:
Toxicant concentrations in surface waters and sediments are of environmental concern due to their potential impacts on ecological and human receptors. Numerical, process-based, mass balance models are one way to understand a system and its governing processes, assist in developing management decisions, and evaluate different scenarios. The US Environmental Protection Agency has developed and continues to improve the Water Quality Analysis Simulation Program (WASP), which is one of the more widely used water quality models in the US and the world. WASP is a modeling framework with which the user can develop a water quality model for conventional or toxicant contaminants over a range of complexities and temporal and spatial scales. With the release of WASP version 8, the architecture of the toxicant module has been updated to allow for an increased number of state variables, including chemical solutes, particulates, and nanomaterials; as well explicitly simulating pathogens, temperature, different classes of dissolved organic carbon, and salinity. This presentation will focus on the recent developments, including the revised WASP8 structure and interface, and on the advances in simulating different classes of toxicants in surface waters and sediments. Details will be given on the new structure for handling light intensity in stream segments, including the distinction of different wavelengths of light, and on simulating nanoparticles, different particle attachment processes, and handling the transformation and production of one state variable to another.
