Studies of tracer transport in the river Elbe

Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Hydroscience and Engineering, Philadelphia, PA, September 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1860/732Accidental river pollution is a severe hazard to all rivers. To mitigate the consequences of a possible contamination of the river Elbe the contaminant transport model ALAMO (alarm model Elbe) was developed. This dead-zone-model (DZM) was calibrated and verified by nine dye experiments. The experimental set-up comprises measurements with in-situ and ex-situ fluorometers and fluorescence spectrometers. The experiments were carried out for a wide range of discharge conditions. In order to account for different discharges the model coefficients of longitudinal dispersion and lateral exchange were parameterized by a power-law relationship depending on the river geometry. A comparison of the experimentally determined tracer concentration curves with those derived with ALAMO gave good agreement. The error of the time of travel, the width and the asymmetry of the tracer cloud amounts to 8 %, 10 % and 12 % at a maximum