A Survey on the Quality of Drinking Water in the Populated Areas of Ardabil Plain Using a Combination of Multi Criteria Decision Making Models and Geostatistics in the GIS Environment

Ardabil Plain is an intermountain area of approximately 820 square kilometers in northwestern Iran, located in the eastern plateau of Azerbaijan within the province of Ardabil. Plain water needed for agriculture, industry and drinking are provided from rivers, deep and semi-deep wells and springs in the current area. To check the quality of groundwater in Ardabil, the data on 56 deep wells, 3 semi-deep wells, 3 aqueducts and fountains, and 7 mouthpiece of streams based on 1389 Regional Water Authority records were sampled. The purpose of this study was to provide an overview of the quality of potable groundwater of Ardabil Plain by using electrical conductivity, PH, SO4--, Cl-, Na and total hardness (in CaCo3) and geostatistical techniques in GIS software through ArcGIS10.3 to produce thematic maps of groundwater quality is Ardabil Plain. The ordinary kriging interpolation method to obtain the spatial distribution of parameters and simple additive weight for weighting and ranking layers were also used. Finally, with regard to the quality of the final map, it was detected that approximately 34 percent (about 280 kilometers) of groundwater for drinking at an optimal level in Ardabil Plain is located on the east side and that the lower quality water belonged to the southwest and northwest of the plain. Also, it was found that there is a direct relationship between the density of population and density of existing wells in the Plain.