Journal of Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers ISSN:1738-3692(Print) 2093-7709(Online) 한국농공학회논문집

The purpose of this study was to develop a ridge regression (RR) model to estimate BOD and TP load using runoff weighted value. The concept of runoff weighted value, based on distributed curve-number (CN), was introduced to reflect the impact of land covers on runoff. The estimated runoff depths by distributed CN were closer to the observed values than those by area weighted mean CN. The RR is a technique used when the data suffers from multicollinearity. The RR model was developed for five flow duration intervals with the independent variables of daily runoff discharge of seven land covers and dependent variables of daily pollutant load. The RR model was applied to Heuk river watershed, a subwatershed of the Han river watershed. The variance inflation factors of the RR model decreased to the value less than 10. The RR model showed a good performance with Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) of 0.73 and 0.87, and Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.88 and 0.93 for BOD and TP, respectively. The results suggest that the methods used in the study can be applied to estimate pollutant load of different land cover watersheds using limited data.