Abstract
Because of the recent severe deterioration of water quality in closed waters in most of the industrial countries as well as Japan, it has become of increasing importance to develope efficient methods of coping with the situation in a comprehensive and systematic manner.
Improvement of monitoring and surveillance system is an important one, which could provides basic information for more efficient programs of water quality management. Regarding this, one difficult but important problem is to determine where are the most appropriate places to allocate the monitoring sites in order to evaluate efficiently the water quality of such two dimensional areas.
In this paper, a quantitative method of allocating monitoring sites is developed. The purpose of the monitoring system is restricted to estimate representative concentrations of water qualty, which is defined as weighted areal integration of the water quality profile of the area. Based on the optimality of the system measured with the total variance of estimate, the configuration of monitoring sites is chosen so as to minimize the variance. Several kinds of measurements of water quality parameters, such as COD, T-N, Chl-a, etc., as well as LANDSAT remote sensing data in Lake Kasumigaura were used to check the feasibility and applicability of the proposed method.
