Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 22, 4229–4249, 2018 https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-4229-2018 © Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Modelling biocide and herbicide concentrations in catchments of the Rhine basin Andreas Moser1, Devon Wemyss1,a, Ruth Scheidegger1, Fabrizio Fenicia1, Mark Honti2, and Christian Stamm1 1Eawag – Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Dübendorf, 8600, Switzerland 2MTA-BME Water Research Group, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, 1111, Hungary acurrent address: ZHAW School of Management and Law, Winterthur, 8400, Switzerland Correspondence: Christian Stamm (
[email protected]) Received: 23 October 2017 – Discussion started: 2 November 2017 Revised: 15 May 2018 – Accepted: 14 July 2018 – Published: 10 August 2018 Abstract. Impairment of water quality by organic microp- ing was explicitly considered by coupling the iWaQa to the ollutants such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals or household AQUASIM model. chemicals is a problem in many catchments worldwide. The model was calibrated with datasets from three differ- These chemicals originate from different urban and agricul- ent small catchments (0.5–24.6 km2/ for three agricultural tural usages and are transferred to surface waters from point herbicides (isoproturon, S-metolachlor, terbuthylazine) and or diffuse sources by a number of transport pathways. The two urban biocides (carbendazim, diuron). Subsequently, it quantification of this form of pollution in streams is challeng- was validated for herbicides and biocides in Switzerland for ing and especially demanding for diffuse pollution due to the different years on 12 catchments of much larger size (31– high spatio-temporal concentration dynamics, which require 35 899 km2/ and for herbicides for the entire Rhine basin up- large sampling and analytical efforts to obtain representative stream of the Dutch–German border (160 000 km2/ without data on the actual water quality.