46-Prioritization of water quality parameters for management of a typical lake in South India

Abstract

Water quality monitoring is expensive, and resource committed to unnecessary water quality measurements may be at the expense of a successful experimental design. Virtually, hundreds of water quality variables exist and are therefore candidates for monitoring. In view of this, a method for prioritizing their selection is important. The principal component analysis (PCA) may be used to find inter-relationship between different variables of the water quality, which helps to find out the influence of specific variables upon the patterns of water quality. Therefore, in the present study, principal component analysis (PCA), which is a complementary approach to geochemical methods in water quality factor identification has been used in prioritizing of lake water quality parameters for the management of lake water quality. In this connection, water quality data of various physico-chemical parameters (pH, EC, DO, alkalinity, calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate, sulphate, chloride, nitrite, total phosphate, iron) pertaining to lake Oussudu was used. In the present study, six factors (total hardness, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, sulphate, nitrate and total phosphate) were found to be dominant for describing water quality pattern of the Oussudu lake, which explained a total variance of water quality data upto 87%.

The results of this study would be an important input in the form of influencing water quality parameters for management of the water quality of the Oussudu lake. The study would be useful to the local public and the concerned authorities, involved in the water resource management of Oussudu lake.