Identification and Planning of Water Quality Monitoring Network in Context of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM)

Abstract

Hydrological system is a quite complex and dynamic in nature because of the heterogeneity of the earth crust and surrounding atmosphere. Water exists on the earth in all three forms of liquid, solid and gas. The scarcity of its liquid freshwater has resulted because of increasing demand in response to growing population, contamination and pollution of freshwater bodies due to urbanization and industrialization. Precise measurement of water quality, in present time, has become the necessity because of increasing scarcity of this precious resource. In a global perspective, organizations dealing with water supply and monitoring are ever concerned about precise assessment of water quality. Researchers are focusing on the assessment of surface and ground water quality on spatial scale rather than point scale, which needs strengthening of monitoring networks time-to-time. The design of a hydrometric network starts ideally with a minimum number of stations, and increases gradually until an optimum network is attained when the amount and quality of data collected and information processed is economically justifiable and it meets the user’s needs to make specific decisions. In hydrology, monitoring of data is mostly site-specific and proper representation of this data on spatial scale requires proper network planning. Since the drivers of water quality vary in space and time, the quality of water also varies in space and time. It is therefore imperative to monitor the quality of water under heterogeneous space-dependent conditions for which a specialized water quality monitoring network is essential. The present paper is in the context of identifying and planning of water quality monitoring network for data acquisition for Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM).