Name
Developing an Integrated Model to Quantify the Influence of Groundwater Flow on Sediment Transport
Date & Time
Tuesday, May 26, 2026, 2:45 PM - 3:00 PM
Description
Water quality and quantity issues are increasingly urgent, posing serious challenges to ecological and human health. Sediment, and suspended particles in rivers are critical aspects of hydrological systems as streambank erosion, sediment transport and deposition can cause streambank instability, reduce reservoir storage capacity, and increase pollutant mobility. Suspended solids and sediments in rivers may carry pollutants like PCBs, heavy metals, PFAS, or nutrients like nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), leading to water quality problems that affect riverine health. This is driven by water movement, making all components of hydrologic flow, including surface water (SW), groundwater (GW), and their interactions (GWSWI), vital in sediment and nutrient transport. Unfortunately, most sediment transport studies and models do not adequately account for GW and GWSWI, leading to incomplete or inaccurate assessments of sediment dynamics in various environments. To address this problem, researchers are increasingly using advanced models to simulate hydrologic and sediment transport processes. Despite the importance of groundwater and surface water, they are often not modeled together, which then ignores the influence of GWSWI on the sediment regime. This work aims to fill this gap by quantifying the impacts of hydrological conditions, including GWSWI, on watershed scale sediment transport and deposition. This work was completed by coupling the integrated hydrological model HydroGeoSphere with a sediment transport model using Python based on the approach used in SWAT.
Location Name
DSU 224
Full Address
Dalhousie University
Halifax NS
Canada
Session Type
Oral Presentation
Abstract ID
139
Speaker Organization
University of Waterloo
Session Name
IAH-14
Presenting Author
Quan Wei