Creating a Water Quality Scale Methodology Using California as a Case Study

Abstract

Water availability analysis traditionally has involved understanding how much water enters and leaves a region and how much is used or stored each year. This mass balance of water, or water budget, is useful for tracking quantities of water; however, it offers no insights into the quality of the water. This paper introduces a method for creating a water quality scale that utilizes unique categories for water quality and reserves additional categories for the insertion of local water quality data. The method was tested using California as a case study. A water quality scale applicable to California was created, and data for the city of Paso Robles were inserted to demonstrate the flexibility of the framework to be made location-specific. The resulting scale can be used by water resource engineers to compare different types of water in terms of quality, measure both the quantity and quality of a local water supply simultaneously, and evaluate the most sustainable water supply options available. Furthermore, the scale can be customized for use anywhere in the world.