IMPLEMENTATION OF GIS BASED WATER QUALITY INDICES FOR WATER QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Water quality modelling is an ideal tool of simulating physical, chemical and biological changes occurring in water systems. It has been utilized in a number of GIS-based water quality management and analysis applications. However, there is a need of a decision making process to translate the modelling result into an understandable form thereby implement the modelling results to the real world. This paper outlines a new water quality index called the QUAL2E's water quality index (QWQI) based on the water quality modelling using QUAL2E. The development mainly includes four steps: variable selection, sub-index development, weight assignment and sub-index aggregation. An experiment of applying the index and GIS to the Sapgyo River in Korea was implemented. Different from other water quality indices for general water uses, the index is specifically used for the simulated water quality indicators. The index can provide a simple and easy-to-understand decision support. Furthermore, interfacing with GIS, the decision analysis can be performed within a spatial environment. However, more study needs to be made in the future including the improvement of aggregation function.