Application of Water Pollution Index in Water Quality Assessment of Rivers

According to the problems that exist in water quality assessment by using current single factor assessment method and comprehensive pollution index method,a new Water Pollution Index(WPI) method was proposed to meet the growing request of water quality assessment and management.The WPI method had been tested and validated in the main stream of Xiangjiang River using the available data sets of 2009,and the results were compared with the evaluation results by using single factor assessment,comprehensive pollution index,fuzzy comprehensive evaluation and principal component analysis methods.Results showed that the WPI method was much more suitable in assessing water quality levels,quantifying water quality,identifying main pollution indicators,comparing water quality of water bodies whose quality were inferior to Class V.Furthermore,the computing process of the WPI method was easy to master.So the WPI for water quality assessment was supposed to have the strong promotion and application value in water quality assessment.