Variability effect of hydrological regime on river quality pattern and its uncertainties: Case study of Zarjoob River in Iran

Abstract

River water quality assessment, affected by pollution load, and river regime changes in various climate conditions, is an implementation that simplifies water resources management, and justifies terms for increases or decreases in human activities. The current paper aims to offer a water quality model of a river considering parametric, hydrologic, and pollution load uncertainty by using uncertainty indexes like Plevel, ARIL, and NUE. These indexes were used to analyze the influences of the model’s parameters and the river’s regime alternations on the results. A Qual2K model, calibrated with PSO algorithm, is presented and connected to GLUE algorithm to assess the model’s uncertainties like effective input parameters on the modeled variations, headwater flow, and input pollutions. Zarjoob River, in the north of Iran, was chosen as the case study. The results illustrate that the interaction among parameters, hydrologic and pollutant discharge data should be considered in river water quality simulation. The presented methodology can analyze the influences of parametric uncertainty, parametric and hydrologic uncertainty, and pollution input load uncertainty according to any quantity of observations and the modeled results of any river.