A catchment-scale distributed water quality model has been developed a
nd applied to rivers in the east of England and southern Scotland. The
model uses a catchment discretisation based on hydrological response
units, or HRUs, which are hydrologically independent as defined by top
ography and drain to an identified location on a stream network. Withi
n each HRU there is no further explicit spatial discretisation, flow a
nd contaminant fluxes being simulated according to the internal statis
tical distribution of spatial properties. The complete model simulates
the daily flux of water and a range of contaminants from each HRU to
the distributed river network, and routes within the river network to
the catchment outlet, taking account of point sources. The model is un
der test at a sample of representative catchments. (C) 1998 Elsevier S
cience B.V.