Unified Theory for Flood and Pollution Routing

Abstract

The physical background and some mathematical aspects of advection‐dispersion models are reviewed. It is shown that flood and pollution routing can be accomplished by the same numerical scheme, derived from the discretization of the purely advective transport equation through exploitation of the scheme's numerical dispersion properties to model the physical dispersion/diffusion behavior of the flow system. Links to traditional storage routing techniques are established. Relation between physical and numerical model parameters are presented, and the numerical properties of the scheme are explored. The paper concludes with a brief survey of fields of application for the numerical advection‐dispersion model.