ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Water
Sec. Environmental Water Quality
doi: 10.3389/frwa.2022.986528

E-DBCM: A Dynamically Coupled Upland and In-stream Water Quality Model for Watershed Water Quality Simulation

 Yanxia Shen1,  Zhenduo Zhu2 and Chunbo Jiang1*
  • 1Tsinghua University, China
  • 2University at Buffalo, United States
Provisionally accepted:
The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

A dynamic bidirectional coupled modeling framework for water environment simulation (E-DBCM), consisting of an upland watershed model (UWSM) and a two-dimensional (2D) downstream waterbody model (DWBM), is developed. The UWSM is used to describe the rainfall runoff and determine the amount of pollutant load to the downstream waterbody, whereas the DWBM is used to simulate the 2D hydrodynamic and pollutant transport process in the downstream waterbody. The UWSM and DWBM are spatial connected through a moving boundary, which can ensure the mass and momentum conservation. The proposed E-DBCM is validated via three cases and the results show that the E-DBCM has satisfactory numerical accuracy, which can effectively reproduce the pollutant transport process and achieve good results in practical applications. The water environment in Yanqi River Basin is evaluated by the E-DBCM. The percent bias is about 10%, indicating that the proposed model is reliable and the simulation accuracy can satisfy the engineering demand. The water pollution problems in this basin are serious, especially during flood season, and both the TP and TN concentrations exceed the discharge standard of water pollutants in Beijing. It is necessary to take various measures to strengthen water environment treatment and protection in this basin.

Keywords: Watershed water environment, UWSM, 2D DWBM, E-DBCM, dynamic bidirectional coupling model

Received: 05 Jul 2022; Accepted: 01 Sep 2022.

Copyright: © 2022 Shen, Zhu and Jiang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Prof. Chunbo Jiang, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China