Richa, Jessa Mae P.

Code: 157

"Enhancing Water Reservoir Management Through Real- Time Monitoring"

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

According to Mamatova et al., 2016, the management of reservoir systems is a very complex
issue and is often considered a wicked problem. In order to understand the “wickedness of
reservoir management”, one needs first to understand what a wicked problem is. The concept
of wicked problems was first introduced in social planning by Churchman (1967) as “a class of
social system problems that are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there
are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the
whole system are thoroughly confusing”. Therefore, these problems are difficult to define and,
arguably, can never be completely solved, as opposed to “tame” problems that can be solved
using methods developed in the fields of engineering or the physical sciences (Rittel and
Webber, 1973). Typically, wicked problems in any given area can be defined by several
characteristics (Conklin, 2006), which include 1) they do not have a definitive formulation (e.g.,
definition of system boundary, management objectives and potential actions); 2) they do not
have a final unique solution; 3) no solution is completely right or wrong; 4) there is no fixed
number of alternative solutions; and 5) every problem is unique, and so is every solution. As a
result, the solution to a wicked problem is often subject to significant uncertainty in
environmental processes in the future (e.g., due to climate change) and dependent on the
formulation of the problem.

According to Tilmant et al., 2010, reservoirs have the ability of regulating water in space and
time flexibly and play a fundamental role in development through benefits of hydropower
production, flood control, water supply, and so on. However, the primary goal of conventional
reservoir operation strategy is to maximize the utilization of water resources and economic
benefits, while ignore the influence from the operation of reservoirs on downstream ecology,
resulting in the alteration of natural flow regime and different degrees of damage to river
ecosystem (Nilsson et al., 2005, Chen and Olden, 2017, Lu et al., 2018, Dong et al., 2020).
Hence, to restore the downstream ecology, reservoir operation should reconcile the economic
benefits of hydropower plant with the ecological benefits of downstream river, on which many
studies have been carried out in recent years (Jager and Smith, 2008, Chen and Olden, 2017,
Jiang et al., 2019).

According to Branche 2017, as an essential national water infrastructure, reservoirs have

functions such as flood control, water supply, power generation, irrigation, navigation and
ecological protection. It occupies an essential position in the rational development and
utilization of water resources and sustainable social development. With the rapid development
of the social economy, a large amount of domestic sewage, farmland drainage and industrial
wastewater flows into the reservoir. It has increased the pollution load of organic matter and
nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus in reservoirs, resulting in severe pollution of most
reservoir waters (Wang et al. 2021). Therefore, scientific and effective integrated management
of the water environment is a significant project to guarantee the regular operation of the
reservoir and restore a good water environment (Zhuang 2016).

According to IOCCG, 2018, water quality is broadly defined as the biological, chemical, and
physical characteristics of water to be maintained to meet the needs of various water usages
including drinking, irrigation, and recreation. It is often measured by a number of parameters,
i.e., turbidity, concentrations of chlorophyll-a (Chl-a), pollution-sediment, dissolved oxygen,
nutrients, and harmful algae, etc. While water temperature, metals, submerged habitat,
salinity, and many other contaminants are also considered indicators of water quality especially
for coastal ecosystems (Mullerkarger, 1992), the scope of this paper is limited to inland water
bodies with indicators that are measurable from remote sensing. Pollution-sediment is often
interchangeably described by either suspended-sediment concentration (SSC) or total
suspended solids (TSS) in literature. TSS is the total organic and inorganic suspended solids in a
water column, which includes chlorophyll-a. SSC and TSS is a measure of the amount of
suspended solid-phase material in water, but the difference is in the analytical methods used to
determine SSC and TSS. Both SSC and TSS are measured by using the dry weight of the
sediment from a known volume of a water-sediment mixture but all the sediment in that
mixture is used to produce SSC while a subsample of the original is used to measure TSS (Gray
et al., 2000). Another related parameter, total dissolved solids (TDS), is a measure of the
amount of dissolved inorganic chemicals consisting of salts and some small amounts of organic
matter that are dissolved in water. The primary source of TDS are usually agricultural and
residential runoff and contaminated substances from sewage treatment plants. Access to clean
water has become an increasingly critical issue worldwide due to growing population, and
increasing pollutant loads from climate and land use changes into freshwater ecosystems. For
example, water pollution and eutrophication is estimated to cause $6 to $16 billion in economic
loss (OECD, 2012) and over 3 million deaths (WHO, 2006) per year globally.
According to Chapman, 1996, water quality is affected by nutrient and sediment loads. Excess
nitrogen and/or phosphorus can create conditions for algal blooms and aquatic plant growth
leading to eutrophication and fish kills. Sediment contributes to water quality deterioration by
altering hydrologic system including: channel degradation that can threaten levees and bridge
piers; reduced performance of intake structures that can threaten water supplies; erosion of
sand bars and islands. On the other hand, changes in land use, urbanization, and climate affects
nutrient cycling (Jordan et al., 2014) by altering the flow volume and rate in streams. This in
turn can lead to bank erosion in local waterways (Herrick and Whitford, 1995). Nutrient-rich
runoff from fertilizers and animal waste can cause algal blooms and eutrophication in surface
waters (Visser et al., 2005), changing water chemistry and habitats, and increasing nutrients
and contaminants that contribute to formation of algal blooms such as gulf hypoxia (Pereira et
al., 2018). Farmers use fertilizers rich in phosphorus and nitrogen to grow crops, but these
excess nutrients can be transported to streams. Phosphorus and nitrogen are considered
limiting nutrients as they are closely related to algae and aquatic plant growth. Concentration
of these nutrients in streams are mainly sourced from agricultural fertilizers, urban runoff,
industrial wastes, and discharges from sewage treatment plants. When available in excess
quantity in surface waters, it can lead to eutrophication (decrease of dissolved oxygen) and
harmful algal growth, which affects human and animal health. Therefore, there has been efforts
from policy makers, the public and researchers on nutrient reduction in surface waters.

Central Water Commission (CWC) monitors water quality, by collecting samples from
representative locations within the processing & distribution system. These samples are
analyzed at the well-equipped laboratories. At these laboratories samples from raw water, filter
water and treated water are taken for analysis. The estimation of water parameters like
turbidity, pH, dissolved oxygen, etc. is done with the help of meters. So the disadvantages of
this existing system are that; there is no continuous and remote monitoring, human resource is
required, less reliable, no monitoring at the source of waters i.e. no on field monitoring and the
frequency of testing is very low. Due to these disadvantages of the existing system it is required
to develop a system that will allow real time and continuous monitoring of water quality. Thus
various advanced technologies for monitoring water quality have been proposed in the recent
years. In the structure of the wireless sensor networking in which a number of sensor nodes are
located in a lake is proposed. A much smaller number of UAVs also watch the lake and they are
controlled by the central monitoring station (CMS). The sensor nodes and UAVs are both
movable whereas the CMS is fixed. The CMS collects the information from the sensors and
process them. In a framework for monitoring water quality by incorporating bacterial
contamination of water for open water bodies using WSN (consisting of sensors for sensing
parameters of interest), UV Light to probe the contamination of water and Fluorescence as a
monitoring tool is proposed. Presents a web based wireless sensor network, for monitoring
water pollution by means of Zigbee and WiMax technologies. This system would have a local
Zigbee network that will be capable of measuring various water quality parameters, a WiMax
network and web based monitoring with the help of a controlling computer. The system is
intended to collect and process information, thus making decisions in real time via a remote
web server. The data is directed through the Zigbee gateway from sensor nodes to the web
server by means of a WiMax network, thus permitting users to distantly monitor the water
quality from their place instead of gathering data from the scene. Experimental results reveals
that the system is capable of monitoring water pollution in real time.