Invited lecture: Strategy for coupling hydrodynamic and water quality models for addressing long time scale environmental impacts

The cost of implementing remediation strategies to halt and reverse the degradation of the marine environment has led to the development of sophisticated water quality models. These models are three-dimensional and time-varying and are dependent on high spatial resolution, three-dimensional, timevarying hydrodynamic models for their transport and mixing information. To provide for an effective use of water quality models for problems involving annual and longer time scales, procedures for coupling them to hydrodynamic models have been developed. In this paper, methods for indirect coupling, whereby the hydrodynamic model is run first and its transport information stored off-line for later use by the water quality model, time averaging and spatial aggregation are introduced and applied to a case study in Massachusetts Bay. The results from this case study (and others) are used to confirm the validity of the coupling procedures.