Modelling potential hydrological impact of abandoned underground mines in the Monday Creek Watershed, Ohio

Abstract

Abandoned underground mines (AUM) have caused dramatic environmental effects that are closely linked to regional sustainability. This paper explores the potential hydrological impact of AUM in the Monday Creek Watershed, a typically mined area in Appalachian region, using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT 2005) model and Sequential Uncertainty Fitting (SUFI-2), calibrated at both the global and local scales. The locally calibrated model better incorporates those key parameters relevant to AUM for specific sub-basins and hydrologic response units. Data from the years 2003-2004 were used for calibration and 2005-2006 for validation. The results were quite satisfactory; both the coefficient of determination (R 2 ) and the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency statistic were over 0.80. The potential influences of AUM were assessed by modelling an alternative scenario assuming no AUM for the period [2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008][2009]. Results show that the hydrological process of lateral subsurface flow plays a dominant role in linking AUM to overall watershed hydrology. The potential hydrological impact of AUM is an increased annual lateral flow of 82.1%, and a decrease in annual surface flow by 15%, leading to an increase of 16.9% in annual water yield for the Monday Creek Watershed. The seasonal fluctuation of water yield has a similar trend to lateral flow, decreasing from March to August and increasing from August to January. Higher volume, higher flow peaks and higher recession constants characterized the hydrograph of daily streamflow from AUM. The results indicate that more emphasis should be put on lateral flow for further study of acid mine drainage and flooding control in those watersheds with AUM.

Response of suspended sediment particle size distributions to changes in water chemistry at an Andean mountain stream confluence receiving arsenic rich acid drainage

“…These natural sources of metals, along with the anthropogenic enrichment from mining operations (Alsina et al, ; Bugueno, Acevedo, Bonilla, Pizarro, & Pasten, ; Leiva et al, ; Oyarzun & Oyarzun, ; Oyarzun et al, ) affect both water and sediment quality within the region. It is well known that the origin and effects of acid mine drainage and acid rock drainage are largely controlled by hydrological processes (Cravotta, Goode, Bartles, Risser, & Galeone, ; Harpold, Burns, Walter, Shaw, & Steenhuis, ; Johnson & Thornton, ; Kimball, Broshears, Bencala, & McKnight, ; McKnight et al, ; Papassiopi et al, ; Pellegrini, Garcia, Penas‐Castejon, Vignozzi, & Costantini, ; Wan, Liu, Munroe, & Cai, ). A systematic increase in the concentration of arsenic, copper, iron, and sulfate in Andean watersheds (Pizarro, Vergara, Rodriguez, & Valenzuela, ; Pizarro, Vergara, Morales, Rodriguez, & Vila, ) highlights the need to further improve conceptual models and expand datasets describing the processes underlying the behavior of dissolved and particle‐bound metal fluxes.…”

Assessment of Integrated Watershed Health based on Natural Environment, Hydrology, Water Quality, and Aquatic Ecology

“…Regional water quantity and quality can be assessed by systematic modeling using the hydrologic model SWAT (Arnold et al, 1998) because of its robust approach based on the soil water balance at the watershed scale. The SWAT model has been successfully applied to a number of river basins and is widely used to study the long-term impacts of hydrological (e.g., Sun and Cornish 2005;Wan et al, 2013;Karlsson et al, 2016;Sellami et al, 2016;Chung et al, 2017) and environmental changes (e.g., Eckhardt and Ulbrich, 2003;Rosenberg et al, 2003;Bouraoui et al, 2004;Chaplot, 2007;Mehdi et al, 2015;Zhou and Li, 2015). Thus, the use of this qualified watershed model is highly useful for assessments of continuous time-series changes and spatial distributions changes in watershed information.…”

Assessment of integrated watershed health based on the natural environment, hydrology, water quality, and aquatic ecology

“…The SWAT model has been successfully applied to a number of river basins and is widely used to study the long-term effects of hydrological (e.g., Sun and Cornish, 2005;Wan et al, 2013;Karlsson et al, 2016;Sellami et al, 2016;Chung et al, 2017) and environmental (e.g., Eckhardt and Ulbrich, 2003;Rosenberg et al, 2003;Bouraoui et al, 2004;Chaplot, 2007;Mehdi et al, 2015;Zhou and Li, 2015) changes. Thus, the use of this qualified watershed model is highly useful for assessments of continuous timeseries changes and spatial-distribution changes in watershed information.…”