Watersheds and Rivers Testing

A watershed is an area of land that drains water into a specific body of water. Watersheds include networks of rivers, streams, lakes and the land areas surrounding them. Watersheds are separated by high elevation geographic features (mountains, hills, ridges). The watershed is an open system with zones of sediment and water production, transfer, and storage. It displays different levels of connectivity between slopes and streams, depending on a set of changing variables. Streams originate from overland flow and from saturated zones according to the watershed geology, topography, and vegetation, as well as to the precipitation type.

However, the pollution problems of watersheds and rivers have always been there. The main pollution of river pollution is organic pollution, and the main characteristic parameters for quality analysis are biochemical oxygen demand, permanganate index and volatile phenol, etc. The lake is characterized by its eutrophication, which means the total phosphorus, total nitrogen, chemical oxygen demand and high manganese salts index need to be included for cleanness analysis. The main pollution indices in inshore area are inorganic nitrogen, active phosphate and heavy metals. These factors constitute a wide range of water environmental problems, causing it difficult to control and manage.

Alfa Chemistry offers advanced analytical instruments that can measure several parameters at the same time such as gas (GC) and liquid chromatography (LC) with different detectors such as flame ionization detector (FID), electron capture detector (ECD), mass spectrometer (MS), and ultraviolet detector (UV). They are used to analyze water for specialized chemicals such as pesticides, perfluorinated organic compounds (PFCs), and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). These chemicals are usually present at low concentrations in water. Special pretreatment is usually needed for concentrating these chemicals in an organic solvent or on a solid phase that can be used to thermally release the chemicals in the injection port of the analytical instrument. In case the analysis is performed to identify unknown organic compounds in water, more specialized techniques are needed such as GC-MS/MS and LC-MS/MS. There are also advanced techniques that allow simultaneous analysis of several metals (inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, ICP-MS, and inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry, ICP-OES) or ions chromatography (IC) at rather low concentrations.

Alfa Chemistry is professional in water quality analysis and we can provide accurate and reliable tests results within the time constraint. We have conducted well water analysis, drinking water quality analysis and wastewater, stormwater, runoff analysis. Please feel free to contact us if you have any concern or would like us to perform any water quality testing. Check our instruments list to see our capabilities.