Groundwater Quality Zonation Assessment using GIS, EOFs and Hierarchical Clustering

Three methods are utilized in this paper to assist in the groundwater clustering, in an arid region aquifer, into similar zones according to its quality. A multiple regression is first applied in order to assess the importance of the different chemical constituents in the amount of total dissolved salt, which shows the dominance of chlorine and sodium. A multivariate analysis based on empirical orthogonal functions and hierarchical clustering (EOFs) is applied to assist in water quality clustering in the studied aquifer. The clustering has produced five distinguished categories of groundwater quality, which agree well with World Health Organisation criteria and limits for water usage. Based on these categories, spatial distribution maps of groundwater quality are produced by Kriging and GIS software. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013