Environmental dispersion in wetland flow

For the typical case of a pulsed contaminant emission into a shallow wetland channel, a theoretical analysis is presented in this paper for the decay of the width-averaged mean concentration under environmental dispersion. The velocity profile of a fully developed steady flow through the wetland channel is obtained with that for the well-known plane Poiseuille flow as a special case. An environmental dispersion model for the mean concentration is devised as an extension of Taylor’s classic analysis on dispersion, and corresponding environmental dispersivity is obtained by Aris’s method of moments and illustrated with an asymptotic time variation with stem dominated, transitional, and width-stem dominated stages. Analytical solution for the longitudinal decay of mean concentration due to environmental dispersion is rigorously derived and characterized with multiple time scales.