Calibration of three resuspension/sedimentation models

Abstract

Three resuspension and sedimentation models (Blom, Lick and Partheniades and Krone) are calibrated and evaluated on data from flume experiments with sediments from Lake Ketel and in situ suspended solids measurements. We applied a formal parameter estimation technique in combination with a statistical evaluation of the model fit and parameter estimates. All three models produce a reasonable reconstruction of the data from the flume experiment and the in situ observations. The differences in the model fit of the three models are small, except for the in situ observations. Here the sum of squared residuals for Partheniades and Krone's is about twice the sum for Blom's and Lick's model. The correlation between parameters in resuspension/sedimentation models can be very high, leading to an uncertainty in parameter estimates of 25-50. The parameter estimations based on the flume data are up to orders of magnitude higher than those estimated from field observations.