GENERALIZATION AND APPLICATIONS OF TRACER DISPERSION DATA¹

Abstract

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.

An experimental test and models of drift and dispersal processes of pallid sturgeon (Scaphirhynchus albus) free embryos in the Missouri River

“…Similar patterns have been reported for free-drifting pallid sturgeon and shovelnose sturgeon in a Missouri River side channel (Braaten et al 2008) and in hydrologic investigations where passively drifting dye particles have been used to determine travel time and dispersion patterns (Kilpatrick and Taylor 1986;Jobson 1997). Related to time-of-travel, drift velocities of pallid sturgeon free embryos decreased as drift distance increased.…”

Dye tracing techniques used to determine ground-water flow in a carbonate aquifer system near Elizabethtown, Kentucky

“…Kilpatrick and Taylor (1986) have recently applied the same techniques to dye-response curves, using the term "unit concentration" instead of normalized load.…”

“…The skewed shape results mainly from unequal flow lengths and velocities along and across the flow path. Kilpatrick and Taylor (1986) used scalene triangles to approximate the skewed shape of the dyeresponse curves for streams. Because the general shape of all observed curves in the Elizabethtown study were similar, a standardized recovery curve was developed to simulate time-concentration curves for the study area.…”

“…34). Similarly, Kilpatrick and Taylor (1986) reported an inverse log-log relation between peak load and time to peak concentration. The relation of standard deviation of traveltime to mean traveltime also is roughly the same ( fig.…”

Discharge‐dependent pollutant dispersion in rivers: Estimation of aggregated dead zone parameters with surrogate data

“…The parameters of the ADZ model can be related to the timescales of the transport directly. Although these timescales change with discharge in a nonlinear way, empirical analysis suggests that the ratios of timescales (known in the ADZ model as the ''dispersive fraction,'' as defined below) seem to change little with discharge [Green, 1998;Wallis et al, 1989], something that was also noted in the simple scaled triangle model formulation of Kilpatrick and Taylor [1986]. Thus the most important aspect of defining an ADZ model for a specified reach of channel is to relate one of the timescale parameters to discharge.…”