Design of River a Water Quality Monitoring Network: An Entropy Based Approach

Design of monitoring networks is considered as the main part of the monitoring system design including selection of the water quality variables, location of sampling stations and determination of sampling frequencies. In this study an entropy-based approach is presented for optimal river water quality network design. In this model, the number and location of sampling sites and sampling frequencies are determined so that "redundant information" is minimized. In this methodology, a water quality simulation model is also used to generate the time series of the concentration of the water quality variables at potential monitoring sites along the river. As several water quality variables are usually considered in designing of water quality monitoring networks, pair-wise comparison is used to combine the spatial and temporal frequencies calculated for each water quality variable. The proposed model has been used to design a water quality monitoring network for the Karoon River in the southern part of Iran. The results show that the proposed model can be effectively used for optimal design of monitoring networks. It is also shown that the redundant information can significantly be reduced by using this approach.