Environmental Quality Monitoring Using Environmental Quality Indices (EQI) Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing: A Review

Abstract

The quality of the environment and the health status of mankind are directly or indirectly associated with one another. When we discuss about the quality of the environment (water, air, and soil), it depends on different parameters associated with them. Environmental quality parameters are often categorized into physical, chemical, biological, microbiological, and heavy metals. But knowledge of these parameters is restricted to scientific community only. Knowledge about these parameters is out of reach of most of the folk, they know only about some parameters, having insufficient knowledge to know about the pollution level in particular part of the environment. Thus, quality indices (QI) are applied to the data of pollution levels to form it easy for folk to know the status of the environment. The basic aim of EQI (air and water quality index) is to categorize the quality of a source based on one or the other system which distilled the list of constituents, and their concentrations present in a sample into a single value. In the present study, an effort has been made to review the various methodologies available for the calculation of EQI (WQI or AQI) and the use of EQI to make the pollution level of air and water (surface water such as river or lake and underground water) understandable to every human being exclusively in India. The precious information on the use of Water Quality Indices (WQI), Air Quality Indices (AQI), remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) for water and air quality mapping is also discussed in the present study.