ABSTRACT
Estuarine models can be classified into two groups: hydrodynamic models and water quality models. They are designed to calculate the concentration or distribution of a constituent, property of parameter in the estuary. Water quality data in the prototype system is vital to the success of water quality modeling. Many kinetic formulations, and their coefficient values, need to be validated using the prototype data. There are two principal components to a mathematical model. One component is concerned with the specific water quality problem content — the particular water body, and specific identification of water quality problem. The second major component of a model is a computational scheme or framework to calculate the concentrations of the state variables. There are two aspects to time and space scale determination: The temporal and spatial extent of the water quality problem and variable, and the temporal and spatial interval of the computation, that is, the time step and spatial grid dimensions of the computational scheme.
