Water Quality Index (WQI) is the most common determinant of the quality of the stream-flow. According to the Department of Environment (DOE, Malaysia), WQI is chiefly affected by six factors, which are, chemical oxygen demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), dissolved oxygen (DO), suspended solids (SS), -potential for hydrogen (pH), and ammoniacal nitrogen (AN). In fact, understanding the inter-relationships between these variables and WQI can improve predicting the WQI for better water resources management. The aim of this study is to create an input approach using ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) to compute the WQI from input parameters instead of using the indices of the parameters when one of the parameters is absent. The data are collected from the nine water quality monitoring stations at the Klang River basin, Malaysia. In addition, comprehensive sensitivity analysis has been carried out to identify the most influential input parameters. The model is based on the frequency distribution of the significant factors showed exceptional ability to replicate the WQI and attained very high correlation (98.78%). Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis showed that the most influential parameter that affects WQI is DO, while pH is the least one. Additionally, the performance of models shows that the missing DO values caused deterioration in the accuracy.

Studying the long-term changes of streamflow is an important tool for enhancing water resource and river system planning, design, and management. The aim of this work is to identify the long-term variations in annual streamflow regime over a 50-year period from 1961 to 2010 in the Selangor River, which is one of the main tropical rivers in Malaysia. Initially, the data underwent preliminary independence, normality, and homogeneity testing using the Pearson correlation coefficient and Shapiro–Wilk and Pettitt’s tests, respectively. The work includes a study and analysis of the changes through nine variables describing the annual streamflow and variations in the yearly duration of high and low streamflows. The analyses were conducted via two time scales: yearly and sub-periodic. The sub-periods were obtained by segmenting the 50 years into seven sub-periods by two techniques, namely the change-point test and direct method. Even though analysis revealed nearly negligible changes in mean annual flow over the study period, the maximum annual flow generally increased while the minimum annual flow significantly decreased with respect to time. It was also observed that the variables describing the dispersion in streamflow continually increased with respect to time. An obvious increase was detected in the yearly duration of danger level of streamflow, a slight increase was noted in the yearly duration of warning and alert levels, and a slight decrease in the yearly duration of low streamflow was found. The perceived changes validate the existence of long-term changes in annual streamflow regime, which increase the probability of floods and droughts occurring in future. In light of the results, attention should be drawn to developing water resource management and flood protection plans in order to avert the harmful effects potentially resulting from the expected changes in annual streamflow regime.

MATEC Web of Conferences, open access proceedings in Materials science, Engineering and Chemistry