Upstream-downstream modeling of river pollutants loading / Rahmatullah Kamal Diab Ali ; Supervised Abdel H Elshaarawi , Mohamed Ismail

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Economics and Political Science - Department of Statistics

River waters are subject to several pollutants and nutrients. Excessive concentrations of nutrients in a body of water stimulate growth of aquatic plants and algae blooms, leading to eutrophication. Improvement or deterioration of water quality is typically assessed by monitoring total loads of Nitrogen and Phosphorus; two main culprits of water eutrophication. This research is concerned with estimating nutrient loads resulting from point sources of water pollutants. It examines a model approach for estimating water pollutants load. At rst, traditional load estimation methods are introduced and tested by means of simulation. While traditional ratio estimators take into account water ow only in the estimation, the proposed model incorporates other relevant auxiliary variables as well as temporal and spatial variability by taking into account upstream-downstream structure in the modeling process.The study applies the proposed methodology on a dataset from the Niagara River as an empirical example. It examines levels of two chemicals: Total Phosphorus (TP) and Total Kjeldahl Nitrogen (TKN) in two river location across a number of years. Estimates on annual loads of nitrogen and phosphorus compounds are generated and compared against annual loads produced by the ratio estimator. Uncertainty of annual load estimates produced by the model is studied by deploying a bootstrap resampling scheme and generating con dence intervals

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