Bathing Water Pollution Analytics

Objective

To deliver a system to identify the owners of public beaches if the water quality may be at risk of breaching the guidelines under the Bathing Water Directive. To deliver a comprehensive system that generates as few false alarms as possible by integrating a range of different data sets together.

Details

Real-time alarms data from the Water Company’s telemetry system is combined with modelled impact data that calculates the impact that a 1m3 discharge of sewage from a specific location will have on all bathing waters in its vicinity. These impacts are modelled for each discharge location and under a number of different tide conditions and wind speeds.

The system uses this combination of data to work out the combined impact that any one discharge will have on the beaches on which it impacts. These discharges take into account current tide heights and wind direction. The discharges are interpolated to the specific time of the discharge and the combined output from all discharges aggregated into a totalised value for each Bathing Water.

All the information is displayed on a dashboard and e-mail alerts are sent to the Water Company and scheduled management reports issued at specified times.

Radar-based rainfall data is correlated with the discharge data to help identify the cause of the discharge.

Benefits of using MAP

The core calculations used to deliver this are complex and involve large amounts of interpolation between times (impacts are only available at three-hour tide intervals). Creating this in MAP simplified the task of validating and testing the results and once validated then templates could be replicated to every other discharge point.