Water Quality Control
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this graduate course from the Civil and Environmental Engineering department, a core requirement for the Environmental MEng program. The material centers on mathematical models predicting how effluents spread and degrade once discharged into lakes, reservoirs, rivers, estuaries, and oceans, covering model formulation, structure, and both analytical and simple numerical solution methods. Topics include oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles as water quality indicators, offshore outfall design and diffusion, salinity intrusion in estuaries, and thermal stratification, eutrophication, and sedimentation in lakes and reservoirs. As with other MIT OCW offerings, course materials such as lecture notes, assignments, and readings are published free of charge, with no certificate offered. The course suits students with a quantitative engineering background looking to model pollutant behavior in natural water bodies.