Numerical modeling of simultaneous tracer release and piscicide treatment for invasive species control in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, Chicago, Illinois

Environmental Fluid Mechanics
By: , and 

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Abstract

In December 2009, during a piscicide treatment targeting the invasive Asian carp in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, Rhodamine WT dye was released to track and document the transport and dispersion of the piscicide. In this study, two modeling approaches are presented to reproduce the advection and dispersion of the dye tracer (and piscicide), a one-dimensional analytical solution and a three-dimensional numerical model. The two approaches were compared with field measurements of concentration and their applicability is discussed. Acoustic Doppler current profiler measurements were used to estimate the longitudinal dispersion coefficients at ten cross sections, which were taken as reference for calibrating the longitudinal dispersion coefficient in the one-dimensional analytical solution. While the analytical solution is fast, relatively simple, and can fairly accurately predict the core of the observed concentration time series at points downstream, it does not capture the tail of the breakthrough curves. These tails are well reproduced by the three-dimensional model, because it accounts for the effects of dead zones and a power plant which withdraws nearly 80 % of the water from the canal for cooling purposes before returning it back to the canal.

Study Area

Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title Numerical modeling of simultaneous tracer release and piscicide treatment for invasive species control in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, Chicago, Illinois
Series title Environmental Fluid Mechanics
DOI 10.1007/s10652-016-9464-1
Volume 17
Issue 2
Year Published 2017
Language English
Publisher Kluwer Academic Publishers
Contributing office(s) Illinois Water Science Center
Description 19 p.
First page 211
Last page 229
Country United States
State Illinois
City Chicago
Other Geospatial Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal
Online Only (Y/N) N
Additional Online Files (Y/N) N
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