Practices of water pollution control at home and abroad indicate that obvious water quality improvement depends on systematic planning and integrated water environment rehabilitation on a catchment or even watershed scale. Surface water quality modeling is the key technical approach to optimize the set of water pollution control schemes. This paper introduces the four stages of surface water quality modeling development, from emphasizing the elimination of black and odorous water to restoring aquatic ecological system. Furthermore, the prospects for the development of surface water quality modeling are discussed, from the perspective of social-economical and technical drive. In the future, the trade-off between model complexity and reliability is anticipated to be overcome, thus quality modeling will play a more effective role in the realization of high quality water environment during the shift from people survival to quality of life.

surface water  /  water quality model  /  environmental planning  /  information technology  /  integrated water environment rehabilitation