Groundwater quality assessment using water quality index and geographic information system based in Sebou River Basin in
- PDF / 1,856,685 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 32 Downloads / 225 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Groundwater quality assessment using water quality index and geographic information system based in Sebou River Basin in the North‑West region of Morocco I. S. Kanga1 · M. Naimi1 · M. Chikhaoui1 Received: 1 June 2020 / Accepted: 14 August 2020 © Islamic Azad University (IAU) 2020
Abstract The assessment of groundwater quality in regions with high economic activities is crucial for sustainable water resource management. The pressures on groundwater in the Sebou river basin are many and increasingly affecting the quality and the availability of groundwater. The identification of areas with groundwater of degraded quality is important for actions to be taken to reduce the pollution. The aim of this research is to assess and spatialize, using GIS, the groundwater quality in view of delineating polluted hotspots to be controlled by water resource managers. A water quality index (WQI) developed in Morocco has been applied to 81 water-quality monitoring stations with database of five water quality parameters from 1989 to 2017. The result indicated that the overall WQI, in most parts of the basin, was classified as medium to very bad. There were only small areas that showed good to excellent water quality. Three water quality parameters ( NO3−, Cl− and electrical conductivity (EC)) underlie the degradation of groundwater quality as these parameters have shown very high correlation coefficients with the overall water quality index and minimum relative values of their sub-indices as 0.00 (very bad) for NO3−, as 0.00 (very bad) for EC and 11.7 (very bad) for Cl−. Intensive agricultural activities, untreated industrial and domestic wastewater and landfills could be responsible for degradation of groundwater quality in this area. Keywords Groundwater quality · Water quality index · Nitrate · Pollution
Introduction Groundwater is the main source of water supply for domestic consumption, agricultural, industrial, and other uses in the everyday life within every society. Unfortunately, this vital resource is under pressure due to the lack of sanitation installations, excessive use of Agro inputs, irrigation, landfills and wastewater discharges, population growth and economic development (Sullivan 2011; Wanda et al. 2015; Yang et al. 2016; WHO 2017; UN 2019). At the pace of economic development, population growth and climate change, maintaining an acceptable water quality for drinking purposes and other water-dependent activities, is a challenge for water management bodies (UNESCO 2015). United Nations (UN) * I. S. Kanga [email protected] 1
Soil and Water Management Laboratory, Department of Natural Resources and Environment, Hassan II Institute of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine, Madinat Al Irfane, PO. Box 6202, Rabat, Morocco
has made it one of its goals to achieve in Agenda 30 and the Millennium Development Goals to provide safe drinking water for all by 2030 (Srebotnjak et al. 2012; Nelly and Mutua 2016; WHO 2017). Currently, several countries are now making great efforts in this direction, as
Data Loading...
