Abstract
A simple method is presented to assess the accumulation of chemical oxygen demand (COD) and ammonia-nitrogen (NH3−N) loads as applied to the Zhangweinan Canal basin, one of the most highly stressed watercourses in the heavily developed Hai River basin in China. The river was divided into seven monitoring sections. The pollution sources and processes in each section, including pollutant inputs and outputs plus their annual fluxes and attenuations, were determined to calculate their accumulation loads. The spatial variations of COD and NH3−N accumulations in the different sections indicated that the accumulation loads were closely related to pollutant inflows and environmental fluxes.
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51079155) and the Chinese National Science and Technology major project of water pollution control and treatment (2009ZX07212-002-003, 2008ZX07209-002). The authors would especially like to thank Dr Jian Xu from the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences for his help in revising this manuscript.