Principal component analysis and hydrochemical facies characterization to evaluate groundwater quality in Varahi river basin, Karnataka state, India

Abstract

The present study envisages the importance of graphical representations like Piper trilinear diagram and Chadha’s plot, respectively to determine variation in hydrochemical facies and understand the evolution of hydrochemical processes in the Varahi river basin. The analytical values obtained from the groundwater samples when plotted on Piper’s and Chadha’s plots revealed that the alkaline earth metals (Ca2+, Mg2+) are significantly dominant over the alkalis (Na+, K+), and the strong acidic anions (Cl−, SO42−) dominant over the weak acidic anions (CO32−, HCO3−). Further, Piper trilinear diagram classified 93.48 % of the samples from the study area under Ca2+–Mg2+–Cl−–SO42− type and only 6.52 % samples under Ca2+–Mg2+–HCO3− type. Interestingly, Chadha’s plot also demonstrated the dominance of reverse ion exchange water having permanent hardness (viz., Ca–Mg–Cl type) in majority of the samples over recharging water with temporary hardness (i.e., Ca–Mg–HCO3 type). Thus, evaluation of hydrochemical facies from both the plots highlighted the contribution from the reverse ion exchange processes in controlling geochemistry of groundwater in the study area. Further, PCA analysis yielded four principal components (PC1, PC2, PC3 and PC4) with higher eigen values of 1.0 or more, accounting for 65.55, 10.17, 6.88 and 6.52 % of the total variance, respectively. Consequently, majority of the physico-chemical parameters (87.5 %) loaded under PC1 and PC2 were having strong positive loading (>0.75) and these are mainly responsible for regulating the hydrochemistry of groundwater in the study area.