Evaluation of Spatiotemporal Variability of Groundwater Level Fluctuations in Zahrez basin, Algeria: Geostatistical Approach
Fatah Bouteldjaoui1, Ahmed Kettab2, Mohamed Bessenasse3

1Fatah Bouteldjaoui, Ecole Nationale Polytechnique, Alger, Algérie.
2Ahmed Kettab, Ecole Nationale Polytechnique, Alger, Algérie.
3Mohamed Bessenasse, Université Saad Dahlab, Blida, Algérie.

Manuscript received on 20 July 2016 | Revised Manuscript received on 30 July 2016 | Manuscript published on 30 July 2016 | PP: 4-11 | Volume-5 Issue-3, July 2016 | Retrieval Number: C1602075316©BEIESP
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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Abstract: Groundwater level fluctuation in aquifer system plays the main role in quantitative water management especially in semi arid and arid areas. In practice, due to aspects of time and cost, data monitoring of water levels is conducted at a limited number of sites, and interpolation technique such as kriging is widely used for estimation of this variable in unsampled sites. The main objective of this study is to get a better understanding of the temporal and spatial variability of the groundwater level fluctuation in regular monitoring wells constructed by the ministry of water resources in zahrez basin, Algeria. In this study, seasonal groundwater level data for 57 wells were collected from 1994 to 2011 and analyzed using the geostatistical approach. The Kolomogorov–Semirnov test revealed that all data followed normal or log-normal distribution. Experimental variograms are fitted by variogram models and computed to be used in the kriging estimations. The results of variographic analysis indicate that experimental variograms are best fitted by the gaussian model and the exponential model. Nugget-sill ratio (<25%) revealed that the groundwater levels have strong spatial dependence in the area. Kriging interpolation techniques have indicated the groundwater flow directions remained almost constant over the years.
Keyword: Geostatistics, Groundwater levels, Semivariogram, Universal kriging, Zahrez basin

Scope of the Article: Performance Evaluation of  Networks