The significance of water quality monitoring

Water resources is the most important natural resources of mankind, is the basic conditions for human survival and development, the sustainable use of water resources, is the social and economic sustainable development is extremely important to ensure. In recent years, with the increasingly serious pollution of water resources, water quality monitoring as the basic work of water pollution control, its significance and role has become more important.

First, the definition of water quality monitoring
Water quality monitoring refers to the chemical substances in the water, suspended solids, sediment and water ecosystems for a unified timed or runtime testing, monitoring and determination of the types of pollutants in the water body, concentration and trends, and evaluation of water quality conditions.
 
The purpose is to accurately, timely and comprehensively reflect the current status of water quality and development trends, to provide a scientific basis for the management of the water environment, pollution control, environmental planning.
 
Water quality monitoring is mainly to test whether the water quality indicators meet the water quality standards. Water quality indicators are parameters describing the quality of water, usually with the type, composition and number of impurities in the water to indicate.
 
Water quality indicators of a wide range of items, depending on the use of different and different. Some of these water quality indicators from the name of the specific impurity components can be seen, such as mercury, cadmium, arsenic, nitrate, cyanide, DTT, etc.; some of the water quality indicators to reflect the results of a number of impurity components of the common impact, such as alkalinity, hardness, etc.; some of the water quality indicators is a number of polluting impurities of the comprehensive indicators, such as turbidity, biochemical oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand and so on.
 
Water quality monitoring indicators can be divided into two categories: one is to reflect the water quality status of the integrated indicators, such as temperature, colour, turbidity, pH, conductivity, suspended solids, dissolved oxygen, chemical oxygen demand and biological oxygen demand, etc.; the other is a number of toxic substances such as phenol, cyanide, arsenic, lead, chromium, cadmium, mercury and organic pesticides.
 
In order to objectively evaluate the status of water quality of rivers and oceans, in addition to the above monitoring projects, sometimes need to carry out the determination of flow rate and flow.
 
    The scope of water quality monitoring is very wide, including uncontaminated and contaminated natural water (rivers, streams, lakes, seas and groundwater) and a variety of industrial drainage.
 
Water quality monitoring can be carried out by chemical, agrochemical, atomic absorption spectroscopic, ion chromatography, gas chromatography and other methods. Among them, chemical method is commonly used in routine water quality monitoring at home and abroad.
 
Second, the significance of water quality monitoring
Water quality monitoring plays a vital role in the whole water environment protection, water pollution control and maintenance of water environment health.
 
For drinking water, if the water contains harmful bacteria, such as typhoid, cholera, dysentery and other germs, it will spread various infectious diseases. When there is a large number of plankton in the water (such as protozoa, algae, etc.), it will affect the physical properties of the water, and produce odour and water colour.
 
If the water contains certain mineral salts impurities, will also cause a variety of diseases. Such as too much fluoride in the drinking water, will make the teeth produce mottled, and cause "mottled teeth disease", serious cases can make the teeth completely ulcerated.
 
 As for sewage discharged from daily life, it can also spread diseases. Therefore, it is of great significance to monitor whether the quality of drinking water meets the standard of drinking water to ensure the safety of people's drinking water.
 
For industrial water, there are different requirements for water quality due to different uses of industrial production.
 
For example, boiler water can not contain a large number of calcium, magnesium sulphate, otherwise the boiler will produce scale, not only will consume too much fuel, but also may cause boiler explosions; and then, metallurgical factories in the cooling equipment, the content of suspended solids in the water supply has very strict regulations. Therefore, monitoring the quality of industrial water is important to prevent industrial water from affecting product quality or damaging containers and pipelines.
 
In addition, water quality monitoring can also provide data and information for environmental management, environmental scientific research; to determine the distribution of pollutants in the water body, tracing the source of pollutants, pollution pathways, migration transformation and elimination of the law, predicting the trend of change in the pollution of the water body; to determine the impact of water pollution on the environment, biology and human health, and evaluate the actual effect of pollution control measures; to provide data representing the current status of the quality of the water body for the evaluation of the environmental quality of water bodies to use; to investigate the environmental quality of water.
 
 Provide data representing the current status of water quality for the evaluation of the environmental quality of water bodies; Explore the causes of pollution, the mechanism of pollution and a variety of pollutants, which is of great significance to the further theoretical study of t