Quantifying Fluxes of Chemical and Biological Species in Great Lakes Watersheds: A Reactive Transport Modeling Framework

Understanding and quantifying the interactions between hydro-climatic processes and the fate and transport of aquatic pollutants and the resultant threats to human and ecosystem health is a high priority research area in many parts of the world. In the Great Lakes region, harmful algal blooms, increased beach closures due to microbiological pollution and drinking water related issues continue to be causes for concern in recent years highlighting the need for accurate transport models. In this presentation we describe the development of a watershed-scale multi-component reactive transport modeling framework to describe fluxes of nutrients and bacteria exported to the Great Lakes. We describe an operator-splitting strategy combined with a particle transport modeling approach with reactions to describe transport in different hydrologic units with interactions between domains. The algorithms are tested using analytical solutions (where available), data from plot-scale experiments and monitoring data from watersheds in the Great Lakes region.