Unified Hydro-Environmental Modelling for Bathing Water Compliance: Second Edition

This book tackles the challenge of accurately predicting water quality in natural systems where artificial boundaries are irrelevant. Traditional hydro-environmental models often use inconsistent parameters across catchments, rivers, estuaries, and coastal waters, leading to errors in assessing diffuse source pollution and bathing water compliance. The study implements a Cloud-to-Coast (C2C) modelling approach, linking catchment, river, and estuarine-coastal models using common input parameters. An empirical formulation captures bacterial decay influenced by salinity, temperature, turbidity, and solar irradiance. The Ribble Estuary and Fylde Coast models were refined with improved 1-D/2-D domain linkages and reduced computational overlap. Numerical codes were optimized for GPU-based parallel computing, tested on the Ribble and Thames Estuaries with over 80 million bathymetric points. This approach enhances predictive accuracy, allows real-time forecasting, and supports compliance with the EU Bathing Water Directive, providing a more realistic, integrated, and computationally efficient framework for environmental impact assessment.