From the State Water Board:
Understanding, managing, and regulating nonpoint source pollution of groundwater is a challenge for California. Nonpoint sources of groundwater pollution encompass tens to hundreds of thousands of individually managed plots, fields, and other land parcels, covering about 10 million acres in California. Models are used to assess the impacts of land management improvements on long-term outcomes at water supply wells, but scaling is an issue, as well as computational resources.
The Nonpoint Source Assessment Toolbox (NPSAT) is an open-source groundwater modeling framework developed by the University of California Davis to serve as an alternative, efficient approach to standard groundwater contamination models. It evaluates the fate and transport of nonpoint source (NPS) contaminants (such as nitrate and salts) leaching to groundwater from agricultural, urban, and natural land uses, in irrigation, public, and domestic supply wells through “on-the-fly” evaluations of user-defined nonpoint source contaminant leaching scenarios.
The Central Valley application of NPSAT, CV-NPSAT, computes 400 years of future contaminant transport to 20,000 production wells and over 60,000 domestic wells in the Central Valley. It can be used by non-technical and technical stakeholders to better understand future groundwater quality as a function of changes to nitrate load and may assist with the evaluation of potential improvements in water quality associated with changes in land use and agricultural practices.
A webinar on March 19 will provide an introduction to the UC Davis Nonpoint Source Assessment Tool framework for the California Central Valley (CV-NPSAT); overview of applying CV-NPSAT to simulating nitrate pollution in the Central Valley aquifer system; hands-on tutorial to the online version, CV-NPSATweb for simulating future nitrate leaching scenarios; and a Q&A session.
Click here to register.
