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Reservoir Routing and Its Application to Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Balance
Version 1
: Received: 6 May 2024 / Approved: 7 May 2024 / Online: 8 May 2024 (00:24:45 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Koutsoyiannis, D. Refined Reservoir Routing (RRR) and Its Application to Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Balance. Water 2024, 16, 2402. Koutsoyiannis, D. Refined Reservoir Routing (RRR) and Its Application to Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Balance. Water 2024, 16, 2402.
Abstract
Reservoir routing has been a routine procedure in hydrology, hydraulics and water management. It is typically based on the mass balance (continuity equation) and a conceptual equation relating storage and outflow. If the latter is linear, then there exists an analytical solution of the resulting differential equation, which can directly be utilized to find the outflow from known inflow, and to obtain macroscopic characteristics of the process, such as response and residence times, and their distribution functions. Here we streamline the reservoir routing framework and extend it to find approximate solutions for nonlinear cases. The proposed framework can also be useful for climatic tasks, such as describing the mass balance of atmospheric carbon dioxide and determining characteristic residence times, which have been an issue of controversy. Application of the theoretical framework results in excellent agreement with real world data. In this manner, we easily quantify the atmospheric carbon exchanges, and obtain reliable and intuitive results, without the need to resort to complex climate models. The mean residence time of atmospheric carbon dioxide turns out to be no more than four years and the response time is smaller than that, thus opposing the much longer mainstream estimates.
Keywords
mass balance; continuity equation; reservoir routing; residence time; response time; carbon dioxide
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Water Science and Technology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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