Plumes

Contaminant plumes are most often considered, as these have some associated urgency. All of the plumes I have worked with in the past forty years have been either chemical or thermal and in some way impacted the environment. There are two main considerations for such plumes: 1) delineation and 2) transport. The associated questions are: 1) how much of what is present and 2) where is moving to. Combined with possible migration and spreading is the question of how it might be changing, including chemical and nuclear reactions. Whether the plume in consideration is in air, surface water, or ground water determines what calculations are appropriate, but the basic issues are the same in any case. In this text we will be considering all of these aspects with several actual plumes plus a variety of software, some of which is publicly available.