Interpretation of seasonal water quality variation in the Yeongsan Reservoir, Korea using multivariate statistical analyses

摘要

The Yeongsan (YS) Reservoir is an estuarine reservoir which provides surrounding areas withnpublic goods, such as water supply for agricultural and industrial areas and flood control.nBeneficial uses of the YS Reservoir, however, are recently threatened by enriched non-point andnpoint source inputs. A series of multivariate statistical approaches including principal componentnanalysis (PCA) were applied to extract significant characteristics contained in a large suite ofnwater quality data (18 variables monthly recorded for 5 years); thereby to provide the importantnphenomenal information for establishing effective water resource management plans for the YSnReservoir. The PCA results identified the most important five principal components (PCs),nexplaining 71% of total variance of the original data set. The five PCs were interpreted as hydrometeorologicalneffect, nitrogen loading, phosphorus loading, primary production of phytoplankton,nand fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) loading. Furthermore, hydro-meteorological effect and nitrogennloading could be characterized by a yearly periodicity whereas FIB loading showed an increasingntrend with respect to time. The study results presented here might be useful to establishnpreliminary strategies for abating water quality degradation in the YS Reservoir.