ABSTRACT
Predictions and quality management issues for environmental protection in river basins rely on water-quality models. These models can be used to simulate conditions in or near the range of the calibrated or verified conditions. In this respect, estimation of parameters, which is still practiced by heuristic approaches (i.e. manually), seems to be the point where the attention needs to be focused. The authors’ research group developed a systematic approach for dynamic simulation and parameter estimation in river water quality models [1,2], which eliminated the cumbersome trial-end-error method. The approach is based on simulating the river stream like a series of CSTRs with embedded parameter estimation capability by using dynamic data. For the implementation of the suggested technique, they have later reported a user-interactive Software named as RSDS (River Stream Dynamics and Simulation) [3]. This study provides a comparative investigation of the suggested modeling approach to a well established and worldwide known water quality software, QUAL2E. Experimental data collected in field observations along the Yesilirmak river basin in Turkey were checked against the predictions from the both software. The results indicated that much better agreement with the experimental data could be obtained from the RSDS with respect to QUAL2E. Thus, the systematic procedure suggested in the present work provides an effective means for reliable estimation of model parameters and dynamic simulation for river basins, and therefore, contributes to the efforts for predicting the extent of the effect of possible pollutant discharges in river basins.
