Kriging of Groundwater Levels – A Case Study

In this paper, application of the spatial statistical technique, kriging, for the spatial analysis of groundwater levels is shown. The data set consists of groundwater levels measured at about 60 points (the number of points vary from year to year) twice in a year (June and September) for six years (1985-1990) in an area of 2100 sq km in part of the canal command area of Indira Gandhi Nahar Pariyojana (IGNP) in Rajasthan, India. With the use of measured elevations of the water table, experimental semivariograms were constructed that characterises the spatial variability of the measured groundwater levels. Spherical, exponential and gaussian semivariogram models were fitted to the experimental semivariograms. The finally selected models were used to estimate the groundwater levels and estimation variance (which express the accuracy of the estimated groundwater levels) at the nodes of a square grid of 5km x 5km and to develop corresponding contour maps. Groundwater levels were also interpolated by generally used Inverse Square Distance (ISD) method and it was found that ISD method resulted in higher errors as compared to kriging method. The kriged groundwater table maps were compared with the groundwater table maps prepared using the ISD method.

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