Modeling Sediment Disposal in Inshore Waterways of British Columbia, Canada

In support of the environmental assessment and regulatory approval process and as an interim guide for field work, a number of numerical modeling studies of sediment disposals were recently carried out by ASL Environmental Sciences Inc. at the designated/potential disposal sites in the inshore waterways of British Columbia, Canada, using the 3D numerical model COCIRM-SED and the short-term fate model of sediment disposal, STFATE. In these applications, STFATE was used to provide initial distributions of suspended sediment and bottom accumulation in detail, typically within the first hour of the sediment disposal operation, as a useful interim guide for field work and input to the 3D model COCIRM-SED, which was then adapted to examine the transport and fate of all disposal materials over much larger spatial scales and longer periods of time. This paper reports the model approaches and the detailed model results in the Brown Passage application.