Assessment of Groundwater Vulnerability in the Borazjan Aquifer of Bushehr, South of Iran, Using GIS Technique

摘要

Introduction Ground water is treated as an important source of water due to its large volumes and its low vulnerability to pollution when compared to surface waters (USEPA, 2006). Bushehr is an arid region with low rainfall (100 mm/year) and very high evapo-transpiration (3000 mm/year). Like other arid countries, ground water is the main source of water for different purposes. Pollution vulnerability assessment requires in-depth knowledge of the hydrogeological, hydrodynamic and hydrochemical characteristics of aquifers. Several methods and simulation models have been developed since the 1970s. In the last 15 years, the advent of GIS, permitting the inventory, archival, retrieval and display of spatial data and the link to numerical rating systems, has resulted in the widespread use of parametric methods, based on the hydrogeological setting: e.g. DRASTIC (Aller et al., 1987) commonly used in the USA, and SINTACS (Civita and De Maio, 2000), an Italian modification.