Investigating Water Quality Sampling Frequency in Urban Surface Freshwater

Resilient and accurate water quality monitoring systems are key to the protection of our drinking, recreational and ecosystem-supporting bodies of water. The largest strains on water quality in the UK typically occur within urban areas, with degradation occurring through point and diffuse sources of pollutants, alteration of natural flow through built-up areas and changes to water temperature (Miller and Hutchins, 2017). The development of new equipment for in-situ high-frequency monitoring in recent decades is beginning to make complete understanding of water quality and processes possible, hence we enter a new era of water quality monitoring network design (Kirchner et al., 2004; Halliday et al., 2015; Chen and Han, 2018). Data obtained from high-frequency sensors deployed in Bristol’s Floating Harbour have been used to determine the optimum sampling frequency to optimize information transfer.