Grid Based Nonpoint Source Pollution Load Modelling

The purpose of this study is to develop a grid based model for calculating the critical nonpoint source (NPS) pollution load (BOD, TN, TP) in Nak-dong area in South Korea. In the last two decades, NPS pollution has become a topic for research that resulted in the development of numerous modeling techniques. Watershed researchers need to be able to emphasis on the characterization of water quality, including NPS pollution loads estimates. Geographic Information System (GIS) has been designed for the assessment of NPS pollution in a watershed. It uses different data such as DEM, precipitation, stream network, discharge, and land use data sets and utilizes a grid representation of a watershed for the approximation of average annual pollution loads and concentrations. The difficulty in traditional NPS modeling is the problem of identifying sources and quantifying the loads. This research is intended to investigate the correlation of NPS pollution concentrations with land uses in a watershed by calculating Expected Mean Concentrations (EMC). This work was accomplished using a grid based modelling technique that encompasses three stages. The first step includes estimating runoff grid by means of the precipitation grid and runoff coefficient. The second step is deriving the gird based model for calculating NPS pollution loads. The last step is validating the gird based model with traditional pollution loads calculation by applying statistical t-test method. The results on real data, illustrate the merits of the grid based modelling approach. Therefore, this model investigates a method of estimating and simulating point loads along with the spatially distributed NPS pollution loads. The pollutant concentration from local runoff is supposed to be directly related to land use in the region and is not considered to vary from event to event or within areas of similar land uses. By consideration of this point, it is anticipated that a single mean estimated pollutant concentration is assigned to all land uses rather than taking into account unique concentrations for different soil types, crops, and so on.