Simulation of nitrogen contaminant transportation by a compact difference scheme in the downstream Yellow River, China

The rapid agricultural development of the Yellow River basin in China has caused serious potential water pollution to the vicinal areas. In this paper, a compact scheme is developed and employed to simulate the unsteady transportation of three representative water quality variables including ammonia nitrogen, nitrite nitrogen and nitrate nitrogen in the downstream Yellow River. As an extension of Ref. [Yang ZF, Chen GQ. The compact fourth-order finite difference scheme for the unsteady convection–diffusion equation involving source term. Chin Sci Bull 1993;38(2):113–6 [in Chinese]], the scheme is applied to the more general convection–diffusion equation with complicated terms reflecting the mutual action of water and sediment, which conforms to the characteristic of high sediment concentration of the Yellow River. The simulation results indicate that the error yielded from the proposed method is smaller than that of the referenced scheme (five-point hybrid scheme) in solving the water quality equation.