Iron and Manganese in Groundwater: Using Kriging and GIS to Locate High Concentrations in Buncombe County, North Carolina

Abstract

For health, economic, and aesthetic reasons, allowable concentrations (as suggested by the United States Environmental Protection Agency) of the secondary contaminants iron (Fe) and manganese (Mn) found present in drinking water are 0.3 and 0.05 mg/L, respectively. Water samples taken from private drinking wells in rural communities within Buncombe County, North Carolina contain concentrations of these metals that exceed secondary water quality criteria. This study predicted the spatial distribution of Fe and Mn in the county, and evaluated the effect of site environmental factors (bedrock geology, ground elevation, saprolite thickness, and drinking water well depth) in controlling the variability of Fe and Mn in groundwater. A statistically significant correlation between Fe and Mn concentrations, attributable to bedrock geology, was identified. Prediction models were created using ordinary kriging and cokriging interpolation techniques to estimate the presence of Fe and Mn in groundwater where direct measurements are not possible. This same procedure can be used to estimate the trend of other contaminants in the groundwater in different areas with similar hydrogeological settings.

Drinking Locally: A Water 87Sr/86Sr Isoscape for Geolocation of Archeological Samples in the Peruvian Andes

“…Process and regression-based methods are ultimately necessary for developing high-resolution models of human 87 Sr/ 86 Sr variability (Hoogewerff et al, 2019;Bataille et al, 2020;Serna et al, 2020). Notwithstanding these limitations, kriging has been used to develop coarse, preliminary predictions of bioavailable 87 Sr/ 86 Sr for hydrological (e.g., Varouchakis et al, 2012;Johnson et al, 2018) and anthropological and archeological applications (Frei and Frei, 2011;Copeland et al, 2016;Wang et al, 2018;Willmes et al, 2018;Adams et al, 2019). Published bedrock and volcanic tephra 87 Sr/ 86 Sr are abundant throughout the Andes (Mamani et al, 2008;Scott et al, 2018), but these samples are limited in various parts of the Peruvian Andes, which limits the accuracy of existing bedrock 87 Sr/ 86 Sr models (e.g., Schenk et al, 1999).…”

Hearing loss in humans drinking tube well water with high levels of iron in arsenic–polluted area

“…On the other hand, the average iron level in drinking well water in India has been shown to be 2.2 mg/L 32 with a maximum concentration of 51 mg/L 33 . Iron levels ranging from 0.15 to 25 mg/L in well water in the western area of the USA were also reported 34 . Thus, it is possible that countries other than Bangladesh also have high concentrations of iron in drinking water, although iron concentrations in groundwater varied depending on geographical or aquifer features, the depth of the tube well and the sampling season.…”

Geovisualization Techniques of Spatial Environmental Data Using Different Visualization Tools

“…In earth environmental sciences, interpolation can be considered as primary form of geostatistical analysis, which is often used to predict values in unobserved locations based on the values in observed locations. Ordinary kriging, a type of interpolation, has become a widely used interpolation method for assessment of spatial variation of groundwater quality [56][57][58][59][60][61]. From this raster file, we created an overlapping map and placed a map legend on it using Screen Overlay.…”