BACKGROUND, AIM, AND SCOPE The chemical substance 2,4,7,9-tetramethyl-5-decyne-4,7-diol (TMDD) is a non-ionic surfactant used as an industrial defoaming agent and in various other applications. Its commercial name is Surynol 104 and the related ethoxylates are also available as Surfynol 420, 440, 465 and 485 which are characterized by different grades of ethoxylation of TMDD at both hydroxyl fu...

Bank filtration of river or lake water represents an efficient and natural purification process used for the drinking water production in many countries and at an amount of about 15-16% in Germany. From experiences over decades particularly at the river Rhine and Elbe, it is known that the occurrence of persistent pollutants in river water can represent a problem for the quality of drinking wat...

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Hydrodynamic river models are applied to design and evaluate measures for purposes such as safety against flooding. The modeling of river processes involves numerous uncertainties, resulting in uncertain model results. Knowledge of the type and magnitude of these uncertainties is crucial for a meaningful interpretation of the model results. The aim of this study is to quantify the uncertainty d...

This paper describes the effects that temperature changes in the Rhine river distributaries have on native and exotic fish diversity. Site-specific potentially affected fractions (PAFs) of the regional fish species pool were derived using species sensitivity distributions (SSDs) for water temperature. The number of fish species in the river distributaries has changed remarkably over the last ce...

The Düsseldorf waterworks have been using riverbank filtration since 1870 with bank filtration as the most important source for public water supply in this densely populated and industrialised region. There have been many threats to this supply in the last few decades—e.g. poor river water quality, heavy clogging of the riverbed, accidental pollution—which had to be overcome. First field studie...

The Lower Rhine Delta, a transitional area between the River Rhine and Meuse and the North Sea, is at risk of flooding induced by infrequent events of a storm surge or upstream flooding, or by more infrequent events of a combination of both. A joint probability analysis of the astronomical tide, the wind induced storm surge, the Rhine flow and the Meuse flow at the boundaries is established in ...

Based on a brief account of 1,000 years of river floods and flood management in the Dutch Rhine delta, it is argued that vulnerability to river floods depends on the complex interaction of economics, institutions, politics and, to a limited extent, climate. Response functions and thresholds for climate change impacts should take this complexity into account rather than assuming society to be co...

Historical records provide direct information about the climatic impact on society. Especially great natural disasters such as river floods have been for long attracting the attention of humankind. Time series for flood development on the Rhine branches Waal, Nederrijn/Lek and IJssel in the Dutch Rhine Delta are presented in this paper. In the case of the Waal it is even possible to compare his...

The levels of PBDEs, alternate BFRs and dechloranes in European Eel (Anguilla anguilla) samples (elvers, yellow and silver eels) were investigated to compare the contamination of eels from the rivers Elbe and Rhine and to estimate the BFR contamination throughout the eel's life cycle. PBDEs were the dominating flame retardants (FRs) in muscle tissues of yellow and silver eels, while the alterna...