Water Quality Modelling For Ocean Engineering Projects - A Review

Water quality models can be effective tools to simulate and predict pollutant transport in coastal water environment, which can contribute to saving the cost of labours and materials for a large number of industrial development in the coastal region. Therefore, water quality models become an important tool to identify water pollution and the final fate and behaviours of pollutants in coastal environment. These developmental projects such as nuclear power plants, desalination plants, ports and harbours construction projects can bring serious effects on coastal environment after enforcement. Therefore, these environmental impacts have to be analysed, simulated, predicted, and assessed using mathematical and numerical models before these construction projects are implemented. These modeling results under different pollution scenarios using water quality models are very important components of marine Environmental Impact Assessment. Moreover, they are also the important basis for environmental management decisions. With the development of model theory and the fastupdating computer technology more and more water quality models have been developed with various model algorithms. Up to date, tens of types of water quality models including hundreds of model software have been developed and applied for different topography, water bodies, and pollutants at different space and time scales.