Creation of a groundwater quality index for an aquifer belonging to the São Francisco River Basin

• Main Authors: Luana Nunes Centeno, samanta Tolentino Cecconello, Tirzah Siqueira
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Associação Brasileira de Águas Subterrâneas 2019-06-01
• Series: Revista Águas Subterrâneas
• Subjects: WQIBHSF. Factorial Analysis. Groundwater.
• Online Access: https://aguassubterraneas.abas.org/asubterraneas/article/view/29286

Understanding how and where anthropic activities influence the water quality of an aquifer is extremely important for the monitoring and management of these, however the tools used for this purpose are scarce. The objective of this study was to create and spatialize a specific groundwater quality index to evaluate the water quality of an aquifer. Thus, through a standardization of the data, as well as a scaling according to its concentration or measurement to create the sub-indexes and based on the multivariate statistics, we established the weights of each of the variables involved in this study. It should be noted that the variables used in this study are secondary data provided by IGAM, collected in the year 2017. In addition, after the creation of this index, it was spatialized in order to visualize the zones that suffer the greatest anthropic influences. Moreover, based on the spatially created index, it was possible to identify that the area in the northern most portion of the map is where the best water quality was found. Thus, it was observed that nitrate is the most important variable in this study. Therefore, it was possible to conclude that the index created is capable of assisting in the monitoring and management of water resources.