Toward a Comprehensive Water-Quality Modeling of Barnegat Bay: Development of ROMS to WASP Coupler

Abstract

The Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) has been coupled with the Water Quality Analysis Simulation Program (WASP) to be used in a comprehensive analysis of water quality in Barnegat Bay, New Jersey. The coupler can spatially aggregate hydrodynamic information in ROMS cells into larger WASP segments. It can also be used to resample ROMS output at a finer temporal scale to meet WASP time-stepping requirements. The coupler aggregates flow components, temperature, and salinity in ROMS output for input to WASP via a hydrodynamic linkage file. The coupler was tested initially with idealized cases designed to verify the water mass balance and conservation of constituent mass using oneto-one and one-to-many connectivity options between segments. A realistic example from the Toms River embayment, a subdomain of Barnegat Bay, was used to demonstrate the functionality of the coupling. A WASP eutrophication model accounting for dissolved oxygen (DO), nitrogen, and constant phytoplankton concentrations was applied to explore the distribution and trends in DO and nitrogen in the embayment for the period of July-August 2012. Results of DO modeling indicate satisfactory agreement with measurements collected at in-bay stations and also indicate that this coupled approach, despite substantial differences in spatiotemporal discretization between the models, provides adequate predictive capabilities. ADDITIONAL INDEX WORDS:ROMS, WASP, hydrodynamic linkage, coupler.

A coupled hydrodynamic (HEC‐RAS 2D) and water quality model (WASP) for simulating flood‐induced soil, sediment, and contaminant transport

“…Accurate data transfer from a hydrodynamic model to a water quality model is critical. Temporal and spatial upscaling when moving from the hydrodynamic model to the water quality model can result in a loss of hydrodynamic information ( Defne et al, 2017 ). Temporal aggregation of the HEC-RAS 2D output in 1-min intervals had minimal impact on WASP results.…”

“…Providing HEC-RAS 2D hydrodynamic flow data at fine spatial and temporal time scales may cause numerical errors for WASP. In addition, this setup would result in excessively long runtimes because WASP uses a single processor to solve fate and transport equations ( Defne et al, 2017 ). To create a computationally robust model, the HEC-RAS 2D computational grid cells should be aggregated for use in WASP.…”

“…WASP does not simulate multidimensional hydrodynamics, but its flexible structure allows for importing hydrodynamic data from an external model. Although WASP accepts hydrodynamic data from several models (EFDC, DYNHYD, RIVMOD, CE-QUAL-RIV1, and SWMM) ( Ambrose & Wool, 2017 ), and other linkages have been developed ( Defne et al, 2017 ; Rifai et al, 2013 ; Wool et al, 2003 ), a coupler between HEC-RAS 2D and WASP framework has not been previously available. A coupled HEC-RAS 2D and WASP provides an opportunity to study fate and transport of sediment and contaminant in rivers and floodplains, which was not possible via the previously developed WASP linkages.…”

Review of Mathematical Surface Water’s Hydrodynamic/Water Quality Models with Their Application on the Shatt Al Arab River Southern Iraq

“…Both upstream and at the entrance of the estuary, the surface layer has a higher simulated DO than the bottom layer. Simulated drops in total nitrogen (TN) near the estuary's mouth might have a negative impact on phytoplankton production of DO, (Defne et al, 2017). Chueh et al (2021) examined the copper distribution in Taiwan's Erren River by combining SWAT and WASP models.…”