Research and analysis

A national database of travel time, dispersion and methodologies for the protection of river abstractions

This report describes the added benefit of incorporating all recent tracer study results into a single searchable database.

Documents

A National Database of Travel Time, Dispersion and Methodologies for the Protection of River Abstractions

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Details

A knowledge of solute travel times within rivers is important for the protection of potable water supplies and in the development and calibration of river and catchment water quality models. This report describes work undertaken to obtain added benefit by incorporating all recent tracer study results into a single searchable database.

Both practical and theoretical approaches for describing advection and dispersion have been described. Results from solute tracer studies, where the raw data were available in electronic form, have been collected from each region of the Agency. These have been plotted in a consistent format. A standard data storage format has been developed and the acceptable data sets have been formatted. This format includes all details of the river traced (region, catchment, area), the contractor that undertook the work, the flow conditions, both at the time of the trace and historical, the tracer used and the reaches studied.

Published 1 January 2002