Modeling water quality in an urban river using hydrological factors--data driven approaches.

Contrasting seasonal variations occur in river flow and water quality as a result of short duration, severe intensity storms and typhoons in Taiwan. Sudden changes in river flow caused by impending extreme events may impose serious degradation on river water quality and fateful impacts on ecosystems. Water quality is measured in a monthly/quarterly scale, and therefore an estimation of water quality in a daily scale would be of good help for timely river pollution management.

Assessment of arsenic concentration in stream water using neuro fuzzy networks with factor analysis.

We propose a systematical approach to assessing arsenic concentration in a river through: important factor extraction by a nonlinear factor analysis; arsenic concentration estimation by the neuro-fuzzy network; and impact assessment of important factors on arsenic concentration by the membership degrees of the constructed neuro-fuzzy network. The arsenic-contaminated Huang Gang Creek in northern Taiwan is used as a study case. Results indicate that rainfall, nitrite nitrogen and temperature are important factors and the proposed estimation model (ANFIS(GT)) is superior to the two comparative models, in which 50% and 52% improvements in RMSE are made over ANFIS(CC) and ANFIS(all), respectively.