Abstract

The International Joint Commission (IJC) has identified 43 Areas of Concern (AOC's) on the Great Lakes. The Detroit River, a binational waterway, is one such AOC with impaired uses documented in the Stage I Remedial Action Plan (RAP) submitted to the IJC under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, including restrictions on fish and wildlife consumption due to mercury contamination, degradation of benthic communities, and restrictions on dredging activities because of several metals, including mercury. The authors modelled the Detroit River as part of the Stage II RAP process. The study used the historical field data to develop a comprehensive transport and fate model, including contaminant source/sink rates among three compartments (air, water, and sediment) and multiple point source contaminant discharges (municipal and industrial sources, tributaries, stormwater, and combined sewer overflows). The Wayne State University's Atmospheric and Sediment Deposition Model (ASDM) is a generalized temporal and spatial transport and fate model for computing water, sediment, fish, suspended solid, plankton, porewater and benthos phase contaminant concentration profiles in the river.

Three compartment (air, water, and sediment) contaminant interaction source/sink rates, and contaminant sorption effects of water and porewater exposure to suspended solids, plankton, fish, sediment and benthos were calculated from this model and applied to the water and sediment equations of continuity in one, two and three dimensions for both steady-state and transient conditions. Two equations of continuity for the water column and surface sediments were solved by the finite difference method, Crank-Nicolson method (Roginski, 1981), and iteration method. The computer program USSMPX (Lin, 1994) is run on a SUN workstation and MTS utilizing databases.

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