Water Quality Model
Human activities are increasing the level of nutrients in surface water bodies, leading to severe algal blooms, lowering dissolved oxygen, and often killing fish and other organisms. EFDC+ provides you tools ranging from simple to complex, all in one coupled model, to better understand the impacts of numerous factors on your ecosystem and support informed decisions for mitigation.
Full Eutrophication Sub-Model
EFDC+ includes a full eutrophication water quality model with 21 state variables allowing you enormous flexibility and control. The model simulates spatial and temporal distributions of water quality parameters including dissolved oxygen, suspended algae, various components of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and silica cycles, and water borne bacteria.
Sediment Diagenesis
To enhance a model’s predictive capability of water quality parameters, as well as simulate the long-term changes in water quality conditions in response to changes in nutrient loadings, coupling of the sediment process model with the water quality model has been achieved in EFDC+. The enhanced EFDC+ sediment diagenesis sub-model was originally developed for the Chesapeake Bay Model by DiToro, which simulates twenty-seven state variables. This sub-model predicts the flux of nutrients between the sediment and the water column.
Aquatic Vegetation
EFDC+ has added the Rooted Plant and Epiphyte Sub-Model (RPEM) to simulate submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV), which are commonly observed along the banks of many rivers and lakes. This sub-model optionally links the water and sediment nutrients to the growth and decay of the aquatic vegetation. In addition to simulating SAV, this sub-model also allows for representative simulation of epiphytes growing on the plants. Epiphyte simulation is critical for accurately evaluating nutrient uptake in wetlands.