Quality assessment of springs for drinking water in the Himalaya of South Kashmir, India
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Quality assessment of springs for drinking water in the Himalaya of South Kashmir, India Showkat Ahmad Lone 1 & Sami Ullah Bhat 1
&
Aadil Hamid 1 & Farooz Ahmad Bhat 2 & Amit Kumar 3
Received: 22 April 2020 / Accepted: 12 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The present study describes the water quality scenario of some freshwater springs of South Kashmir during the two-year period (2013–2015) because of rising pollution risks endangering water resources globally. The accessibility to quality drinking water has become a challenge and is receiving renewed attention. A total of 96 samples from twelve springs were collected and analyzed for major drinking water quality parameters. Piper trilinear and Durov diagram depicted dominance of Ca–Mg– HCO3 hydrochemical facies and simple dissolution and mixing process. Water quality was falling in very good to excellent class and well within the desirable limits of WHO thereby indicating huge potential for meeting rising drinking water demand. The principal component analysis (PCA) revealed the generation of three components (PC1, PC2, and PC3) with higher eigenvalues of 3 or more (3–6) explaining 40, 21, and 17% of the overall variance in water quality data sets, respectively. The components obtained from PCA indicate that the parameters responsible for variations are mainly related to discharge, temperature, and dissolved oxygen (natural), nutrients (agriculture), and cation and anions (lithology). The results suggest that the hydrochemistry of springs is jointly controlled by lithology and anthropogenic inputs. Keywords Ecosystem health . Spring . Himalaya . Drinking water . Threatened . Water pollution
Introduction Springs have recently attained an extraordinary importance due to the role they play in meeting the increasing drinking water demands (Bhat et al. 2020). Water shortage because of climate change and rising water demand across the globe has increased (Wegener et al. 2010; Burek et al. 2016), and freshwater scarcity is increasingly perceived as a global systemic risk (Mujumdar and Tiwari 2019). Water, an increasingly Responsible Editor: Xianliang Yi * Sami Ullah Bhat [email protected] 1
Department of Environmental Science, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Kashmir, Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir 190006, India
2
Faculty of Fisheries, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir 190025, India
3
School of Hydrology and Water Resources, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province 210044, People’s Republic of China
stressed resource, is witnessing a worldwide increase in consumption, especially from the last four decades largely due to a blend of rising human population growth, socio-economic development, and changing consumer choices and trends (WWDR 2019). Water is very vital for human life and overall development and catches more attention globally as 20% of the populat
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