Water-quality modelling of the Upper Mersey river system using an object-oriented framework

The aim of this paper is to present the recent advances in the development of an object-oriented software system for water-quality management, and discuss the results from its application to the study of the Upper Mersey river system in the United Kingdom. The software has been extended and includes tools for the construction of flow duration and low-flow frequency curves using different methods, the sensitivity analysis and parameter estimation of the water-quality model, and the stochastic simulation of the mass balance at the discharge points of point-source effluents. The application of object-orientation has facilitated the extension of the software, and supported the integration of different models in it. The results of the case study are in general agreement with published values. They also include low flow estimates at the ungauged river sites based on actual data for the artificial sources, and water-quality simulation results, which have not been presented earlier in the literature for the Upper Mersey system.