In order to monitor the changing water table in the field, determination of the main sampling points is very important to reduce sites and save time and cost. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is one of the data reduction techniques used to extract the important components that explain the variance of a system. In this paper, the PCA was used to identify the effective wells of Qheidar Aqufer, Zanjan, to determine the groundwater level and remove the less important ones. From the study region which an area of about 920 km2, 48 wells (sites) were investigated. Using PCA, the relative importance of each well was calculated between 0 (for completely ineffective well) to 1 (for the very effective wells). The study showed the elimination of wells whose relative importance was less than 0.5 (i.e. half the total number of wells), coefficient of variation of groundwater level relative to the use of all wells did not greatly increase, and the error to determine the level of groundwater was less than 13 percent.

Keywords: Principal components analysis, Water table levels, Multivariate statistics.

Full-Text [PDF 372 kb]   (3011 Downloads)