Jamaica Bay is a small (50 km 2 ) tidal embayment located in Queens and Brooklyn, NY in the southwest corner of Long Island. The majority of the bay is part of the Gateway National Recreation Area overseen by the National Park Service. Over the last century the bay has been heavily impacted by man, and as a result suffers from poor water quality. There are two primary reasons for the poor water quality. The first is the four major water pollution control plants (WPCPs), operated by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYCDEP), that discharge approximately 250 million gallons per day (MGD) of secondary treated effluent into the bay. The second reason is man made changes to the geometry of the bay including deep borrow pits used for fill to create the John F. Kennedy International Airport and the creation of islands in the bay, both of which contribute to poor circulation in the back end of the bay called Grassy Bay. As a result of the nitrogen loadings from the WPCPs and the poor circulation in the bay, the bay is highly eutrophic and suffers from high chlorophyll-a concentrations, and periods of hypoxia and unionized ammonia toxicity. The low dissolved oxygen levels violate water quality standards in Jamaica Bay set by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC).As part of an order-on-consent with the NYSDEC, the NYCDEP was required to develop a Comprehensive Jamaica Bay Water Quality Plan (CJBWQP) for nitrogen by October 2006 to reduce nitrogen levels in the bay. The reduction of nitrogen levels includes a limit on the nitrogen discharge from the WPCPs to a 12-month rolling average of 45,300 lb/day. The development of the plan included the use of a water quality model to analyze various remediation alternatives. Alternatives included several levels of nitrogen removal at the WPCPs, relocation of the WPCP outfalls, bay recontouring, aeration, and combinations of these alternatives. Costs were developed for each of these scenarios, and cost benefit curves were developed for improvements in dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll, and unionized ammonia.The development of the plan was complicated by several factors, which included multiple jurisdictions with competing interests; public resistance to certain alternatives; possible future water quality standards involving dissolved oxygen, unionized ammonia, and coastal nutrients; the rapid unexplained loss of marshes in the bay; and the fact that the majority of the alternatives would not attain water quality standards 100 percent of the time despite meeting the effluent nitrogen loading limit of 45,300 lb/day. This paper describes the development of this plan.
The work reported herein was conducted as part of the Water Quality Research Program (WQRP), Work Unit No. 32694. The WQRP is sponsored by Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (HQUSACE), and is assigned to the US. Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station (WES) under the purview of the Environmental Laboratory (EL). Funding was provided under Department of the Army Appropriation No. 96x3 121, General Investigation. The WQRP is managed under the Environmental Resources Research and Assistance Programs (ERRAP). Dr. John Barko was Manager, ERRAP, and Mr. Robert Gunkel was Assistant Manager, ERRAP, for the WQRP. Technical Monitors during the study were Messrs. Pete Juhle and James Gottesman and Dr. John Bushman, HQUSACE. Principal Investigator of the Work Unit was Dr. Carl E Cerco, Water Quality and Contaminant Modeling Branch (WQCMB), Environmental Processes and Effects Division (EPED), EL.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) is currently in the process of developing numeric nutrient criteria for its bays and estuaries for submittal to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA). In order to avoid implementing generic nutrient criteria, FDEP has encouraged scientists, water quality managers and engineers familiar with specific water bodies to compile and develop water body specific information that can be used to develop more scientifically based criteria for individual water bodies. This paper summarizes the efforts to develop an estuary model framework that can be used to assess and develop nutrient criteria for the Pensacola Bay system, which includes Escambia Bay, Blackwater Bay, East Bay, and Pensacola Bay, located in the Florida Panhandle.The methodology for developing proposed nutrient endpoints during this effort was to use an estuary modeling framework to assess how nutrient response variables (e.g., chlorophyll-a, dissolved oxygen, light transparency for seagrass needs) respond to changes in nutrient loadings, and to determine what nutrient loads to the system are required to protect the ecological health as indicated by these nutrient response variables. The effort involved using an existing threedimensional, time-variable model of the Pensacola Bay system that was calibrated for two, lowflow months during 1997 and expanding it for calibration/validation to the calendar years 1997 and 1998. These years represent an average flow year (1997) and a high flow year (1998) based on USGS flow records on the Escambia River at Century, FL from 1935-2009. Both years also included sustained periods of summer low-flow that represent critical conditions in the bay.The models used for the assessment include the hydrodynamic model, Estuarine, Coastal and Ocean Model with sediment transport (ECOMSED) (Blumberg and Mellor 1987), and the water quality model, Row Column AESOP (RCA) (HydroQual 1999), which is similar to USEPA's WASP model (originally developed by HydroQual personnel). The sediment transport component of ECOMSED was not used. The RCA model was expanded to include color as a state-variable in order to assess the light conditions necessary to establish and maintain submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV). The original version of the water quality model was also expanded to include a sediment nutrient flux model, which completes the mass balance with the water column and allows for the direct calculation of sediment oxygen demand (SOD) and nutrient fluxes rather than the need to assign these fluxes and adjust them for projection analyses.Potential parameters that can be used to develop nutrient response criteria include: chlorophyll-a, dissolved oxygen and Secchi depth (measure of light transparency), so it was important that the model was able to assess each of these parameters accurately. Using these nutrient response criteria, protective nutrient loads to the bay system can be developed. Escambia Bay is a highly stratified system due to a large influx of fresh w...
The City of Boston and Boston Harbor have long played an important role in the nation's history from the early days of the American revolution to a focal point of the 1988 presidential campaign when the harbor was cited as one of the nation's dirtiest bodies of water. However, in the 15 years since that low point in the harbor's history, approximately $4 billion has been spent (mostly supported by the ratepayers of the City of Boston) to improve the existing antiquated sewage collection, treatment, and disposal system. Included in this effort was the modernization and expansion of the Deer Island wastewater treatment facility and the construction of a 15.3 km outfall pipe to completely remove the Deer Island effluent from Boston Harbor and discharge it offshore in northwestern Massachusetts Bay.At the same time that upgrades to the Deer Island wastewater treatment plant and the construction of the outfall tunnel were being performed, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) provided funding for a Harbor and Outfall Monitoring (HOM) program and for the construction of a mathematical model of water quality for the Boston Harbor and Massachusetts and Cape Code Bays system. The ongoing HOM program, which is a requirement of the NPDES permit for the MWRA outfall, is meant to provide data with which to compare to pre-discharge baseline data to help assess any impact of the discharge on Massachusetts and Cape Cod Bays. The mathematical model was used to provide an early assessment of expected water quality conditions once the outfall went online. Now that the outfall tunnel has been completed and began operating on September 8, 2000, data from the ongoing HOM provide an opportunity to perform a post-audit of the water quality model to evaluate how its projections compare with observed post-discharge data.The purpose of this paper is to provide a short review of the history of environmental pollution and regulation within Boston Harbor, overviews of the Harbor and Outfall Monitoring (HOM) Program and the Bays Eutrophication Model (BEM), and a post-audit of the BEM using post-discharge data collected by MWRA.
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