The U.S. Geological Survey has performed hundreds of time‐of‐travel and tracer dispersion studies in streams and estuaries nationwide. This paper presents an approach to unitizing this type of data to make it more universally usable in predicting the behavior of soluble contaminants entering waterways. Practical application of the superposition principle and of the scalene triangle as an approximation of the response curve from a slug injection of a solute are demonstrated to be a means of simulating the downstream effects of any form of soluble contaminant release.