Identifying uncertainty of the mean of some water quality variables along water quality monitoring network of Bahr El Baqar drain

AbstractAssigning objectives to the environmental monitoring network is the pillar of the design to these kinds of networks. Conflicting network objectives may affect the adequacy of the design in terms of sampling frequency and the spatial distribution of the monitoring stations which in turn affect the accuracy of the data and the information extracted. The first step in resolving this problem is to identify the uncertainty inherent in the network as the result of the vagueness of the design objective. Entropy has been utilized and adopted over the past decades to identify uncertainty in similar water data sets. Therefore it is used to identify the uncertainties inherent in the water quality monitoring network of Bahr El-Baqar drain located in the Eastern Delta. Toward investigating the applicability of the Entropy methodology, comprehensive analysis at the selected drain as well as their data sets is carried out. Furthermore, the uncertainty calculated by the entropy function will be presented by the means of the geographical information system to give the decision maker a global view to these uncertainties and to open the door to other researchers to find out innovative approaches to lower these uncertainties reaching optimal monitoring network in terms of the spatial distribution of the monitoring stations