Advanced monitoring of wastewater quality: data collection and data quality assurance

Reliable water quality monitoring is increasingly recognised as an essential element of a strategy to reach current environmental quality objectives. In the last few years, continuous water quality monitoring has demonstrated to be useful in capturing the dynamics of sewer and wastewater systems and in evaluating the impact of discharges on the receiving water bodies.

As measurements are carried out under arduous conditions, practical implementation of such monitoring systems entails several challenges, and automation of data collection and data quality assessment has been recognised as a critical issue. In this paper, a data quality assessment strategy is presented to achieve efficient water quality monitoring in real-world scenarios.

Next to practical aspects concerning installation and maintenance of sensors, the paper also presents a software tool aimed at assessing the quality of the data being collected. In this paper, results showed the successful implementation of the proposed strategy for collection of water quality data at the inlet of a wastewater treatment plant.