Evaluation of estimation methods for nitrate and atrazine loads during rainfall events in agricultural catchments

摘要

To estimate pollutant loads on'a catchment is a recurring problem for water resources managers. The literature presents many different methods for estimating these pollutant loads. The aim of this paper is to assess four methods used to estimate nitrate and atrazine loads during rain events Then, the precision of these estimations for various sampling time steps is assessed. The reference load is calculated using hourly data. Two criteria of evaluation are used: the difference between the estimated and reference loads, and the RMSE (root mean squared error) Significant differences are observed and they increase with the length of the sampling time step. It is demonstrated that it is important to take into account uncertainties related to the method adopted to estimate pollutant load.