Abstract
A monsoon season monitoring data from June to September, 2005 of a small forested watershed located at the upstream of the North Han River system in Korea was conducted to analyze the flow variations, the NPS pollutant concentrations, and the pollution load characteristics with respect to sampling frequencies. During the 4-month period, 1,423 mm or 79.2% of annual rainfall(1,797 mm) were occurred and more than 77%, 54% and 68% of annual T-N, $NO_3$-N and T-P loads discharged. Flow rate was continuously measured with automatic velocity and water level meters and 58 water quality samples were taken and analyzed. It was analyzed that the flow volume by random measurement varied very widely and ranged from 79% to 218% of that of continuous measurement. It was recommended that flow measurement of small forested watersheds should be continuously measured with automated flow meters to precisely measure flow rates. Flow-weighted mean concentrations of T-N, $NO_3$-N and T-P during the period were 2.114 mg/L, 0.836 mg/L, and 0.136 mg/L, respectively. T-N, $NO_3$-N and T-P loads were sensitive to the number of samples. And it was analyzed that in order to measure the pollution load within the error of 10% to the true load, the rate of sampling frequency should be higher than 89.7% of the sample numbers that were required to compute the true pollution load. If it is compared to selected foreign research results, about 10 water samples for each rainfall event were needed to compute the pollution load within 10% error. It is unlikely in Korea and recommended that thorough NPS pollution monitoring studies are required to develop the standard monitoring procedures for reliable NPS pollution quantification.
