Surface Water Resources Assessment and Planning with the QUAL2KW Model: A Case Study of the Maroon and Jarahi Basin (Iran)

Abstract

Mathematical models are useful for predicting the reactions of watercourses such as rivers due to the entry of contaminants. Some of these models are able to simulate the effects of present and future loadings as well as aid managers and officials in making decisions even if the data are sparse. In other words, river water quality preservation requires more investment in wastewater treatment and/or the installation of collection and control systems; it may also limit activity expansion in the river basin. The conservation of watersheds such as the Maroon and Jarahi basin, which provide water for drinking and for industrial and agricultural use, is socio-economically vital. Therefore, the first stage of managing the conservation of water resources is understanding their qualitative changes. For this purpose, the QUAL2KW mathematical model was utilized to simulate the river water quality in this example region. According to the reported values of water quality parameters and pollutants at monitoring stations, it was established that the river is at a critical condition in terms of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) pollution due to the discharge of urban and industrial wastewater, as well as high electrical conductivity (EC) due to the drainage of agricultural lands. Based on the statistics calculated during the validation step, the authors concluded that the QUAL2KW water quality model is reliable in the simulation of qualitative parameters and the pollution data of the study area; namely the Maroon and Jarahi river basin located in the south-west of Iran. This will help stakeholders to better manage watersheds with sparse data. This region has been suffering from climate change which has led to droughts and the construction of several dams to retain water. For the second and third stations, the NASH (named after the mathematician John Forbes Nash) values were 0.96 and 0.92, respectively, indicating a relatively high model accuracy. The evaluation using the root mean square errors (RMSE) and NASH showed that the quality of water at the second station was better than the other two stations based on the coefficient of determination R2. Since there were three drains at station number 3, the wastewater entering the Maroon River had a higher level of contamination.