EPA Research Partner Support Story: River Spill model
Partners: Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO), an interstate commission representing 8 states (Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia), US Army Corps of Engineers, USGS, and the Delaware River Basin Commission.
Challenge: Providing information to water utilities that will inform operating decisions and minimize impacts on water users resulting from spills and extreme low flows as a result of climate change within U.S. waterways and coastal estuaries.
Resource: River Spill model in collaboration with Global Quality Corp.
Project Period: 2016 – Present
There are 25,000 navigable miles of inland waterways within the contiguous U.S., which transport an estimated 630 million tons of commodities valued at $73 billion annually. There are also hundreds of drinking water intakes that supply drinking water to 66% of American water consumers. Spills within U.S. waterways can threaten safe drinking water supplies, fire protection, commerce, and critical navigation activities.
“The River Spill model has been used on several recent spills on the Ohio river and has predicted the actual times and concentrations very well. If accurate spill and river condition data is fed into the River Spill model, the model seems to accurately predict the resulting conditions downstream.” – ORSANCO Technical Program Manager Sam Dinkins
Given this challenge, EPA ORD researchers developed a web-based advanced River Spill Modeling System (RSMS) software that enables accurate two-dimensional modeling of spills in rivers. RSMS helps utilities decide if they should close their intake, add additional treatment, or access alternative water supplies, if available, while the worst of the spill plume passes. RSMS uses real time and predicted river flows and velocities collected and distributed by the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and it can be run in a web-browser on a computer or handheld device. RSMS captures the effect of dead-zones along the river-banks and leverages real-time river data updates. That functionality is not available elsewhere in the Federal government. RSMS uses the Lagrangian numerical modeling approach and that avoids the fake dispersion effects seen in all other models that use the Eulerian numerical modeling approach. The ability to avoid “numerical dispersion” is critical for estimating the plume leading edge, trailing edge travel time, and peak contaminant concentration to support the intake shut-off related decision-making.
RSMS has been used by ORSANCO on spills that occur on the Ohio River and its tributary system for many years. The results indicate good correlation between the model and actual spill conditions. RSMS was used successfully by ORSANCO to model the East Palestine spill. Global Quality Corp. has provided cloud-based hosting and technical support for RSMS. RSMS is also being adapted to work on other river systems such as the Delaware River and the Des Moines River.
Future enhancements to the River Spill Model include adding layers of GIS data such as bridge crossings, pipeline crossings, real-time barge traffic, and locations of oil and chemical refineries.