Assimilative capacity

hydrology
water-quality

Assimilative capacity is the headroom a receiving water has to absorb a pollutant load — or a withdrawal of flow — before a water-quality criterion would be exceeded. It is evaluated at a design low flow, conventionally the 7Q10, so the screen reflects the stream when it is least able to dilute.

In the water-balance analysis, the campus's consumptive cooling draw is subtracted from the live receiving-water flow and compared against the 7Q10: a negative balance means the consumptive loss erodes the dilution flow the permit record assumes, shrinking assimilative headroom. A negative figure is a screening flag — a lead to verify against the live gauge and the permit, not a verdict.

Backlinks

Open questions

Unanswered threads in the record that raise this concept.

The municipal-WWTP dilution check is hydraulic only — no per-parameter assimilative capacity on record

Ask this concept

Search the corpus around Assimilative capacity — the records, entities, and open questions in its neighborhood. Results are cited corpus nodes, not a written answer; for a drafted answer over the whole record, use the site-wide Ask.