Investigating the Status of Nitrates in Nahavand Drinking Water and Its Quality Zoning

Access to safe water is one of the main components of sustainable development, and monitoring of water resources used by humans is necessary and essential. In order to better understand the water quality of human societies, the analysis of physical and chemical parameters of water resources is done with the help of indicators and statistical methods. In this research, the quality of urban water resources of Nahavand was investigated and zoned with the help of nitrate parameter interpolation methods. For this purpose, 48 samples of drinking water from 16 districts of Nahavand city were taken randomly and pH, EC and No3 parameters were measured in them. Wilcox, WQI and NPI indices were used to determine the quality of water sources. The comparison of the values of the studied parameters with the WHO standard and the national standard of Iran was done by a one-sample t-test. Nitrate zoning map and WQI index in Nahavand urban water sources were also prepared by using Kriging method. Based on the obtained results, there was a statistically significant difference between the values of the investigated parameters with the national standards of Iran and WHO (p<0.05). So that the average pH and No3 were lower than the standard limits and the average EC was higher than the standard limit and according to the Wilcox classification, 44% of Nahavand city water samples were in medium salinity condition and 56% of the remaining samples were in medium salinity condition.