WINTER-REGIME THERMAL RESPONSE OF HEATED STREAMS

The increase in water temperature in natural streams due to waste heat disposal from thermal power plants leads to extensive ice-free reaches during winter periods. It is shown that the surface heat exchange between water and the atmosphere can be expressed, for most practical purposes, as a linear function of the water temperature. Using this approximation, a closed-form solution of the one-dimensional unsteady convection-diffusion equation is developed to predict temperature distributions in streams and the lengths of ice-free reaches downstream from the thermal discharge sections.