IQAFAL - Índice Fuzzy de Qualidade de Água para Ambiente Lótico.

Abstract

The dissemination of information on water quality for a non-specialist audience is essential to support programs and institutional policies for the management of aquatic environments. Therefore, water quality indices have been proposed since they are able to synthesize into a single value or category information usually described from an extensive set of chemical, physical and biological water quality variables. Most of the proposed methodologies for the development of water quality indices are based on expert knowledge regarding the choice of variables used, weighting the relative importance of each variable, and methods used to aggregate data variables in a single value. This research proposes a new index of water quality, based on fuzzy logic and aimed at the lotic environment. This index, the IQAFAL, was developed through the collaboration of experts with broad and proven experience in the area of water quality. The essence of developing an index, using fuzzy logic is the ability of that methodology to represent, more efficiently and clearly, the limits of the ranges of the variables of water quality for a set of subjective categories, where these limits are not well defined or are inaccurate. The index proposed in this paper was developed based on knowledge of experts in water quality of the Rio de Janeiro Environmental Agency - INEA and applied to data of water quality of the Paraíba do Sul river, obtained by INEA, in the years 2002 to 2009. The results of IQAFAL showed that the index was able to synthesize the water quality of this stretch of the Paraíba do Sul, corresponding satisfactorily to the assessments of water quality described in the reports available. It was also noted that with this methodology it was possible to avoid the attenuation of the influence of a variable in critical condition by the influence of other variables in good conditions producing an undesirable result in the final index.