An M.Sc. Degree on a thesis entitled: “Evaluation of water quality index for irrigation canals in Egypt”

Eng. Hossam Ashraf Hamdy Elgzzar, a research assistant at the Drainage Research Institute (DRI) affiliate to the National Water Research Center (NWRC), has earned his M.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering (Water Resources Engineering and Hydraulics) – Faculty of Engineering, Benha University – for the thesis entitled: “Evaluation of water quality index for irrigation canals in Egypt”. The work focuses on the Egyptian canals, where these canals have a vital historical role for a lot of consumption-based activities such as irrigation, industry, ecology and drinking purposes. Nowadays, some countries try to develop water quality indices for their specific uses that are convenient with the country's environmental conditions rather than using the well-known international water quality indices which may not be suitable for the local conditions in the country. Therefore, the objective of the master study was to develop two water quality indices for the Egyptian canals, namely Egyptian Irrigation Water Quality Index (Eg-IWQI) and Water Supply Intakes (Eg-WSI), both indices are utilized, respectively, to evaluate the Egyptian canals for irrigation use, and to assess water quality for canals intake before the treatment process for drinking use. Water quality indices (WQIs) were developed depending on data collected from the National Water Quality Monitoring Networks (NWQMN) during the period from August 2008 to July 2017. The development of two WQIs was performed in four steps: 1) Parameters selection, 2) Transformation of the parameters to a common scale, 3) Assignment of weights, and 4) Aggregation of sub-indices to conduct the final index score. The water quality of three main canals were evaluated by using the developed indices EG-IWQI, EG-WSI and Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment Water Quality Index (CCME-WQI). Evaluation results by using the developed indices EG-IWQI, EG-WSI didn’t show big difference with CCME-WQI. However, evaluation results for Egyptian canals will differ between the developed indices EG-IWQI, EG-WSI and CCME-WQI if there were a problem in parameters with vital weights in the developed indices.