Engineering Commons^™

Management Transition To The Great Lakes Nearshore: Insights From Hydrodynamic Modeling, Chenfu Huang, Anika Kuczynski, Martin T. Auer, David M. O'Donnell, Pengfei Xue

Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering Publications

The emerging shift in Great Lakes management from offshore to nearshore waters will require attention to complexities of coastal hydrodynamics and biogeochemical transformations. Emphasizing hydrodynamics, this work resolves transport processes in quantifying discharge plume and pollutant of concern (POC) footprint dimensions, the latter being the portion of the plume where water quality standards are not met. A generic approach, isolated from pollutant-specific biokinetics, provides first-approximation estimates of the footprint area. A high-resolution, linked hydrodynamic-tracer model is applied at a site in the Greater Toronto Area on Lake Ontario. Model results agree with observed meteorological and hydrodynamic conditions and satisfactorily simulate …