Tracer experiments in the Rhine Basin: evaluation of the skewness of observed concentration distributions

Field studies reporting on the propagation of a pollution wave travelling down a river mostly show persistence of the temporal skewness. As a result, in the Rhine Alarm-Model a constant skewness coefficient (equal to 1) has been applied. The appropriateness of this assumption has been proven by tracer experiments. This finding seems to be in conflict with the solution of the transient storage equations of the one-dimensional Fickian-type diffusion equations, the so-called dead-zone model, showing a continuous decrease of the skewness with the distance. On the other hand, based on these equations as an initial-boundary value problem for the transport of a spill in a river with dead zones Schmid [Schmid, B.H., 2002. Persistence of skewness in longitudinal dispersion data: can the dead zone model explain it after all?. Journal of Hydraulic Engineering 128 (9), 848–854, September 1, ASCE], showed that the skewness can locally increase, if there are river reaches with different values of the mass-transfer coefficient between the main stream and the dead zone, or due to changing topography.