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Geostatistical analysis of spatial and seasonal variation of groundwater level: A comprehensive study in Malwathu Oya cascade-I, Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka

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Author Affiliations

  • 1Dept. of Agri. Engineering & Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Rajarata University of Sri Lanka, Puliyankulama, Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka
  • 2Dept. of Agri. Engineering & Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Rajarata University of Sri Lanka, Puliyankulama, Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka
  • 3Dept. of Agri. Engineering & Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Rajarata University of Sri Lanka, Puliyankulama, Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka

Int. Res. J. Environment Sci., Volume 5, Issue (8), Pages 29-36, August,22 (2016)

Abstract

Groundwater is one of the major sources of fresh water to meet the domestic, irrigation and industrial water demands. Because of its easy accessibility and assurance of water during dry periods, farmers tends to exploit more groundwater basically for irrigation purposed without assessing the hydro-geological properties, spacing, safe yield and recharge potential. Though management programs often give less importance to groundwater because it is less visible than surface water, management of groundwater is very imperative. Mapping of groundwater level can be used as the initial step of management of this valuable natural resource. Even though geostatistical analyst tool in Arc GIS has become more popular among the methods used to create the interpolation surfaces, it is required to find out the method which gives the best results. In this study geostatistical analyst tool was used to compare the accuracy of different interpolation methods to interpolate groundwater level in Malwathu Oya cascade-I in Anuradhapura district using Arc GIS 10.2. The total area of the cascade was divided in to 1 Km2 grids and forty wells were purposely selected as two wells per grid to assess the groundwater level in dry and wet seasons. Groundwater level was measured with reference to both mean sea level (MSL) and land surface datum. Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW), Radial Basis Function (RBF) which are deterministic interpolation methods and Kriging and Empirical Bayesian Kriging (EBK) which are geostatistical interpolation methods with different parameters were used for this study. Groundwater level in dry and wet seasons with reference to MSL and land surface datum was interpolated using different interpolation methods. Results revealed that EBK with power semivariogram recorded the lowest root mean square error (RMSE) for interpolating groundwater level in both dry and wet season with reference to MSL as well as for interpolating groundwater level in wet season with reference to land surface datum. Lowest RMSE value for mapping groundwater level in dry season with reference to land surface datum was given by Simple and Universal Kriging methods. Therefore, it can be concluded that EBK has better accuracy in most of the cases of mapping groundwater level in Malwathu Oya cascade- I.

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