Pollution Routing in Streams

A method for the numerical simulation of longitudinal dispersion of pollutants in streams is developed and tested. It is based on the one-dimensional, linear advection-dispersion equation and utilizes the concept of numerical dispersion to model the physical dispersion process in a manner similar to the one used in storage routing schemes of the Muskingum-type. The finite difference scheme used is explicit, second-order-in-space accurate, and stable when used to model physical dispersion phenomena. The validity and reliability of the computations are investigated in three examples.