Quality of Groundwater in an Area with Intensive Agricultural Activity

• DOI: 10.1007/s12403-015-0185-3
• Publication Date: 2016-12-01T18:41:35Z
• Authors: Mohamad Sakizadeh; Farzaneh Faraji; Mohamad Javad Pou...
• Keywords: 2. Zero hunger; 13. Climate action; 0207 environmental engineering; 02 engineering and technology; 15. Life on land; 6. Clean water

The main objectives of this study were the application of principal component analysis (PCA) for variable selection of an aquifer with a large amount of data record and assessment of the overall quality and the extent of groundwater contamination in Andimeshk, Iran. For this purpose, 17 groundwater quality variables in 46 sampling wells and springs during an eight-year time period (2006–2013) were considered. A PCA was conducted for dry and wet seasons to find out associations between variables, thus reducing the dimensionality of the data. PCA resulted in the reduction of original data to nine variables in wet season encompassing 94.35 % of the total variance and eight variables in dry season accounting for 92.03 % of the total variance. A Procrustes Analysis on the reduced data set showed a high similarity between the original and reduced variables. Groundwater quality index indicated that the most polluted parts of the study area are located in areas of intensive agricultural activities. The results of water quality proved that the effect of geological formations on groundwater quality is mainly due to the influence of EC in terms of TDS, Mg, Ca, Sulfate, and Cu rather than other parameters. The application of animal manure at excessively high rates or the combined application of high rates of manure and nitrogen fertilizer has increased nitrate levels in recent years. Fertilizers may also have an impact on the levels of copper in ground water as it is one of the impurities in these inorganic fertilizers.