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Water quality of surface drinking water sources may vary considerably in time. Thesevariations are associated mainly with variations of meteorological characteristics and diffuseand point-pollution sources in watersheds (Kistemann et al., 2002; Ott and Uhlenbrook,2004). Water treatment plant operators must consider variations of source water quality toadequately adjust the treatment processes in plants. This is a considerable challenge, becauseraw water quality changes may occur very rapidly. When there is a delay betweencontamination occurrence and operator response, a possible deterioration of treated waterquality could occur, increasing the risk to public health. In fact, for certain water qualityindicators, in particular for microorganisms, the time delay between water sampling andlaboratory analysis results is generally long (several hours and in general a day or more). Pastresearch on modelling water quality in source waters has focused mainly on physico-chemicalparameters such as color, conductivity and turbidity (Sun and Koch, 2001; Maier et al, 2004;Zhang et al., 2004). Much less attention has been paid to model microbiological parameters,such as coliforms.The objective of this research was to develop models to predict temporal variations of E. coliin a drinking water source. Models for E. coli prediction can be used as a tool for water utilityoperators for treatment adjustment in order to minimize the human risk of infection (asmicrobiological indicators are used as pathogen surrogates). Includes 6 references, figures.

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Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 06/01/2007 Number of Pages: 6File Size: 1 file , 210 KB