Assessment of Groundwater Quality in Kaboudarahang Plain using Factor and Cluster Analysis

Quality of water resources in each region is influenced by factors with natural or man-made origin suffers from physical, chemical, and biological changes. These changes create serious limitations for utilization of water resources Therefore, investigation of these resources is essential to maintain and improve their quality. The present study was carried out in order to classify groundwater quality of Kaboudarahang Plain using statistical techniques, including factor and hierarchical clustering analysis on qualitative data (14 parameters) for a 3-years period (1390-1392) through SPSS software. Factor analysis results showed that 81.74% of changes influenced by four components. Moreover, based on cluster analysis on 30 wells, the wells were classified to three groups. According to the classification, group I had the lowest and group III had the highest concentration of the water quality parameters. However, all groups were in C3S1class from the agricultural point of view.