Groundwater Quality Analysis of Northeastern Haryana using Multivariate Statistical Techniques

Abstract

Sub-surface water contamination has become a topic of main concern due to anthropogenic activities. MSTs were performed to appraise the seasonal and spatial variations in quality of sub-surface water and to trace the sources in NE Haryana. WQI was computed to analyse the quality of overall groundwater for domestic purposes during pre-and post-monsoon periods. The post-monsoon season water samples were found to be good for human consumption compared to pre-monsoon season. HCA, DA and PCA were performed to the quality of sub-surface water data computed on 14 elements from 30 locations geographically well-distributed across the area. Thirty sampling sites were classified into 02 clusters using HCA, group two having higher contamination than group one. The most significant elements accounting for spatial and seasonal variations in quality of sub-surface water of the study region was obtained by using DA. For the combined dataset of the pre-monsoon and post-monsoon seasons of 2017 the temporal and spatial DA identified pH, Na, Cl, TDS, Mg and F as the six most significant element, which distinguishes between water pre-eminence in the two seasons and accounts for 88.34% spatial and 100% seasonal assignation of cases. PCA was used to the data observed from the 02 groups, which obtained four varimax-factors in each group, accounting 77.54 and 84.77% of the total variance, respectively. Varimax factors evolved from PCA represented that quality of sub-surface water variation is possibly attributed by multiple geogenic, anthropogenic factors, ion exchange processes and rock-water interactions in groundwater.