File: ABSTRACT.TXT Visual Plumes Model System Abstract Center for Exposure Assessment Modeling (CEAM) National Exposure Research Laboratory - Ecosystems Research Division Office of Research and Development (ORD) U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) 960 College Station Road Athens, Georgia 30605-2700 706/355-8400 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Summary Visual Plumes (VP), is a Windows-based computer application that supersedes the DOS PLUMES (Baumgartner, Frick, and Roberts, 1994. Dilution models for effluent discharges, Third Edition. EPA/600/R-94/086) mixing zone modeling system. VP simulates single and merging submerged aquatic plumes in arbitrarily stratified ambient flow and buoyant surface discharges. Among its new features are graphics, time-series input files, user specified units, a conservative tidal background-pollutant build-up capability, a sensitivity analysis capability, and a multi-stressor pathogen decay model that predicts coliform bacteria mortality based on temperature, salinity, solar insolation, and water column light absorption. VP includes the DKHW model based on UDKHDEN (Muellenhoff et al., 1985. Initial mixing characteristics of municipal ocean discharges. EPA/600/3- 85/073a and b), the surface discharge model PDS (Davis, 1999. Fundamentals of environmental discharge modeling. CRC Press), the three-dimensional UM3 model based on UM, and the NRFIELD model based on RSB. These models may be run consecutively and compared graphically to help verify their performance. The Brooks equations are retained to simulate far-field behavior. Finally, DOS PLUMES may be selected as one of the "models," giving full access to its capabilities. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------