Uncertainties in assessing annual nitrate loads and concentration indicators: Part 1 Impact of sampling frequency and load estimation algorithms - INRAE - Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Transactions of the ASABE Année : 2010

Uncertainties in assessing annual nitrate loads and concentration indicators: Part 1 Impact of sampling frequency and load estimation algorithms

Incertitudes dans l'évaluation des pertes et des concentrations en nitrate dans les eaux superficielles à l'échelle du bassin versant : Effets de la fréquence d'échantillonnage et des méthodes de calcul des flux

Résumé

The objectives of this study are to evaluate the uncertainty in annual nitrate loads and concentrations (such as annual average and median concentrations) as induced by infrequent sampling and by the algorithms used to compute fluxes. A total of 50 watershed years of hourly to daily flow and concentration data gathered from nine watersheds (5 to 252 km2) in Brittany, France, were analyzed. Original (high frequency) nitrate concentration and flow data were numerically sampled to simulate common sampling frequencies. Annual fluxes and concentration indicators calculated from the simulated samples were compared to the reference values calculated from the high frequency data. The uncertainties contributed by several algorithms used to calculate annual fluxes were also quantified. In all cases, uncertainty increased as sampling intervals increased. Results showed that all the tested algorithms that do not use continuous flow data to compute nitrate fluxes introduced considerable uncertainty. The flow weighted average concentration ratio method was found to perform best across the 50 annual datasets. Analysis of the bias values suggests that the 90th and 95th percentiles and the maximum concentration values tend to be systematically underestimated in the long term, but the load estimates (using the chosen algorithm) and the average and median concentrations were relatively unbiased. Great variability in the precision of the load estimation algorithms was observed, both between watersheds of different sizes and between years for a particular watershed. This has prevented definitive uncertainty predictions for nitrate loads and concentrations in this preliminary work, but suggests that hydrologic factors, such as the watershed hydrological reactivity, could be a key factor in predicting uncertainty levels.
Le taux de nitrate dans les eaux est l'objet de toutes les attentions : des programmes de suivi des concentrations et des flux sont engagé afin surveiller l'état de la qualité physico-chimique des masses d'eau et de déterminer leur évolution dans le temps. Mais les indicateurs utilisés sont construits sur un nombre restreint de mesures induisant des incertitudes sur leur validité. Dans cet article, les auteurs proposent une méthode scientifique pour calculer ces incertitudes et permettre aux gestionnaires des réseaux de surveillance de mieux interpréter les tendances observées sur les flux de nitrate et les débits d'eau.
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-02593218 , version 1 (15-05-2020)

Identifiants

Citer

François Birgand, C. Faucheux, G. Gruau, Bénédicte Augeard, Florentina Moatar, et al.. Uncertainties in assessing annual nitrate loads and concentration indicators: Part 1 Impact of sampling frequency and load estimation algorithms. Transactions of the ASABE, 2010, 53 (2), pp.437-446. ⟨hal-02593218⟩
11 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More