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CLUES model calibration and its implications for estimating contaminant attenuation

journal contribution
posted on 2024-06-21, 03:50 authored by Annette Semadeni-Davies, Charlotte Jones-Todd, MS Srinivasan, Richard MuirheadRichard Muirhead, Alexander Elliott, Ude Shankar, Chris Tanner
Catchment water quality models are essential for freshwater management; however, their value is dependent on their performance and level of uncertainty. Here we present the latest calibration of the Catchment Landuse for Environmental Sustainability model (CLUES) and examine the implications of the calibration for estimating in-stream contaminant attenuation. CLUES estimates catchment mean annual loads of Total Nitrogen, Total Phosphorus and E. coli and is widely used in New Zealand for both catchment planning and policy development. We found that CLUES gives reasonable load estimates at the catchment scale. However, there was significant uncertainty in the SPARROW parameterisation. We conclude that while CLUES can be used to estimate catchment contaminant loads, it cannot adequately estimate instream attenuation. Improved representation of lower order streams in the calibration data would allow us to evaluate the source yields from each of the model components to better estimate attenuation.

Funding

Funded by the New Zealand Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment's Our Land and Water National Science Challenge (Toitū te Whenua, Toiora te Wai) as part of project Sources and Flows

History

Publication date

2020-02-07

Language

  • English

Does this contain Māori information or data?

  • No

Journal title

Agricultural Water Management

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