A key component of a hydrological transport model is the surface runoff element, which allows assessment of sediment, fertilizer, pesticide and other chemical contaminants. Building on the work of Horton, the unit hydrograph theory was developed by Dooge in 1959. It required the presence of the National Environmental Policy Act and kindred other national legislation to provide the impetus to integrate water chemistry to hydrology model protocols. In the early 1970s the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began sponsoring a series of water quality models in response to the Clean Water Act. An example of these efforts was developed at the Southeast Water Laboratory, one of the first attempts to calibrate a surface runoff model with field data for a variety of chemical contaminants.
The attention given to surface runoff contaminant models has not matched the emphasis on pure hydrology models, in spite of their role in the generation of stream loading contaminant data. In the United States the EPA has had difficulty interpreting diverse proprietary contaminant models and has to develop its own models more often than conventional resource agencies, who, focused on flood forecasting, have had more of a centroid of common basin models.