Spatial variation modelling of groundwater electrical conductivity using geostatistics and GIS

Abstract

Optimized management of water resources, conservation and their quality increase is needful with data existence in basis of situation, amount and distribution of water chemical factors for example; electrical conductivity (EC) in determined geographical region. Accuracy of interpolation appropriate methods and variation map preparation of groundwater quality variables is independent to region conditions and existence of enough data. That is true selection of interpolation methods is basic and important step in management of groundwater resources. EC is one of the important indicators for groundwater quality evaluation. The objective of this research was to determine the most suitable interpolation method and their accuracy for analysis and checking spatial variation of groundwater EC amount in central regions of Guilan province, northern Iran. This investigation evaluated the inverse distance weighting (IDW), global polynomial interpolation (GPI), local polynomial interpolation (LPI), radial basis function (RBF) and ordinary kriging (OK) methods for estimation of groundwater EC in paddy fields. In IDW method, for variable estimation used power value 1–5 that power value equal 1 was exact. Gaussian model was the best one fitted on empirical semivariogram of variable data in OK method. Standard statistical performance evaluation criteria include root mean square error (RMSE), correlation coefficient (R) and mean absolute error (MAE) were used to control the accuracy of the prediction capability of the developed methods. Results showed that the best estimator was OK method which was the most exact with regard to other methods for estimation groundwater electrical conductivity.