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Coupling Substance and Tracer Transport to the Water Fluxes

WaSiM (Richards) provides a possibility for modelling tracers and salts. It is possible to consider radioactive tracers as well as conventional ones. Evaporating tracers as well as non-evaporating (e.g. salts) can be modelled, the latter can even fall out if the concentration gets too high.

Transport is only regarded as advection - no diffusion is modelled (since it is small compared to the advective processes). For salts (non-evaporating tracers), the absolute amounts will be used (in kg/m2) for submodels interception, snow, soil and groundwater; all other tracers are handled by their concentrations. The handling of absolute masses is required since the concentrations for salts have an upper limit. Water flows into other sub models can only use that concentrations wheres the storage content of the salt can be higher than that saturation concentrations.

Another limitation of the tracer module is also that there are no interactions regarded between multiple tracers - wether on the total amount of soluable tracers nor on vegetation or soil specific properties (e.g. conductivities). Output of tracer concentrations and masses can be defined as grids and as statistics.

Important parameters for the tracer module are:

  • Radiactive half-life for radiactive tracers
  • minimum and maximum concentration values in water, either in relative parts or in Kg/Kg

Details on coupling tracers to the water fluxes can also be found in the WaSiM model documentation.

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WaSiM-News

11/12/2023

new release availabe:
WaSiM 10.07.02 -> More »