Assessment of water quality in an artificial urban canal: A case study of Songdo City in South Korea

Currently, the waterfront facility was constructed in New Songdo City, South Korea. It has the various water leisure areas and especially an artificial urban canal with filtered seawater by re-circulating flow system. However, due to excessive amount of nutrients from seawater combined with complicated geometry, it is highly vulnerable to deterioration of water quality. In this study, flow characteristics and pollutant transport were analyzed with comprehensive numerical models, MIKE 3 FM and ECO-lab. Based on these numerical results, notable sampling points were selected for field measurements and comparison between modeling and measured results were conducted. In addition, the integrated water quality evaluation index, Water Quality Index was applied to analyze various water quality issues. We also set up scenarios to control the two kinds of water quality factors, dissolved oxygen (DO), and total phosphorus (TP). As a result, the effect of 20% reduction of TP was less than 10% and it was almost ineffective for a year but it was reduced by up to 40% in case of scenario which DO is increased by 20%. Therefore, it was recommended to control the DO concentration, usually by applying re-aeration facility, rather than TP in artificial urban canal with seawater.