Abstract
Growing water scarcity is one of the major challenges of the 21st century, especially in arid and semi-arid climates such as our study area. The efficient, sustainable and integrated groundwater management plays a key role for conserving this vital resource. In order to overcome this issue, the study of aquifer system’s behavior seems necessary. For this purpose, the areal piezometric level map is an essential tool. As piezometric level data are spatially limited in sample points, the spatial interpolation and geostatistics are the best way to produce the needed map. Several methods exist allowing to approach real values with varying degrees of accuracy. This work aims to compare and evaluate spatial interpolation methods for groundwater level of Haouz using a dataset of 39 piezometers. The deterministic methods used in this study are Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) and Radial Basis Functions (RBF) and the probabilistic ones are ordinary kriging (OK), simple kriging (SK) and universal kriging (UK). This study shows the difficulty of having a key role to choose the suitable method for given input dataset. The best model remains the one that, after comparing several methods, offers the best accuracy, which is assessed using Cross-validation and statistical indicators. The results reveals that ordinary kriging with trend removal technique is the optimal method in this case. It indicates the superiority of this technique with a decrease in Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) up to 61.67%. It underestimates groundwater level with an average of 2.8%, which is reliable. The areal piezometric level and associated prediction standard error maps give additional information and recommendations that characterize the studied aquifer system and will ultimately improve sustainable groundwater management.
Highlights
Groundwater is a vital source of supply for urban and rural needs and socio-economic development across the world [1]-[3]
Kurtosis Pearson (=3.9) being greater than 3, demonstrates a leptokurtic distribution type, which is more pointed than the normal distribution
The results indicate the superiority of ordinary kriging technique with a decrease in Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) up to 61.67%
Summary
Groundwater is a vital source of supply for urban and rural needs and socio-economic development across the world [1]-[3]. Growing population causes more use and scarcity of water in various fields. All the threats stated above are exacerbated in arid and semi-arid climates Amongst those climates, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and Morocco have to address water-related challenges even more than anywhere else. Several international report and researches have revealed the alarming state of water in MENA region [11]-[16]. These reports and researches focus their recommendations, inter alia, on the importance of rational use of water and the crucial and pressing need of sustainable and integrated water management, especially for groundwater
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