Monitoring the Quality of Groundwater using Artificial Neural Network Methods, a Case Study of Qorveh and Dehgolan Counties

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Department of GIS, Engineering Faculty, University of Zanjan, Zanjan, Iran.

10.22034/nawee.2025.520885.1154
Abstract
Water Quality Index (WQI) is an index that assesses water quality using a set of physical, chemical, biological, and microbiological parameters in the water environment. WQI is determined using 12 different parameters including magnesium, calcium, sodium, potassium, chloride, sulfate, nitrate, bicarbonate, electrical conductivity of water, total dissolved solids, water hardness, and acidity. These parameters were measured twice a year in the months of Khordad and Mehr from 1387 to 1400 in the sample wells of the study area. The WQI is calculated by combining and weighting these 12 parameters to determine the quality of water for the wells. In this study, two well-known models of artificial neural networks, including Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Radial Basis Function (RBF), are employed and evaluated for the desired objective. The findings of this study demonstrate that by reducing the number of parameters to 8, the artificial neural network can estimate the water quality index with very high accuracy, with a correlation coefficient of 0.99 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.02. Additionally, the MLP provides better results compared to the RBF. The quality of groundwater in the area of Dehgolan County is generally very good and good. However, the quality of groundwater in the area of Qorveh County, with movement from the western side of the County towards the east and southeast, changed from very good to very bad, respectively.

Keywords


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