Influence of Field Environmental Factors on Water Transparency

Abstract

Water transparency is an important parameter describing water optical property. Based on the summarized research results in recent decades, this paper systematically expounded the mechanism of various influencing factors for water transparency in the field environment, and classified the factors into three categories: direct influencing factors (including suspended solids, CDOM and algae), distinct indirect influencing factors (including nutrient concentrations and aquatic plants), and weak indirect influencing factors (including temperature, pH). In different water bodies the contribution impacts of direct influencing factors vary with the different environmental characteristics. Distinct indirect influencing factors usually have composite effects on water transparency, which make the mechanism more complex. Weak indirect influencing factors are constrained by other environmental factors, featuring more uncertainty. According to the analysis of previous researches, the following three aspects should be concerned in further studies: (1) more mechanism researches should be conducted based on field measured data analysis; (2) coupling mechanism of multi-factor for water transparency should be concerned.