Looking for clarification on Phosphorous.ITS

Question

Hello,

I am trying to look at model domain-wide phosphate flux from the sediment in AEM3d, and I have questions on the Phosphorous.ITS file. First, the manual indicates headers for 33 columns. My Phosphorous.ITS file has 35 columns, so I want to confirm the column I should be looking at. I also have questions on the units in the ITS file. The manual indicates mg P /L for sediment flux. Is this the correct unit? It seems that flux units should include time. I'm also wondering over what volume the flux is calculated (what depth I need to consider when converting to units of g/m^2-d).

Thanks very much!

Paula

Answer 1

Hi Paula,

Looking at the code it seems there were 2 additional columns added to the file basinAvgTP (Col 34) and basinDelTP (Col 34) in CAEDYM.  But there is a comment in the code saying these aren't working yet so I would ignore them.

If possible, I would recommend moving to the new water quality model (in the development download) as I have much greater confidence that it is doing what it is supposed to be doing.  

The time-series outputs are also easy to read and more complete.

Chris

Comments

Hi Chris, Thanks for this response! We will migrate as time allows. For now though, I'd like to confirm the units on the file that we have from the release. Can you confirm the units on that?

Thanks again,

Paula

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Looking through the code it appears the sediment flux in the ITS file is the change in the average concentration for the full domain. So you need to multiply by the total volume to get g/day the divide by total wet area to get g/m2/day