The health risk weighting model in groundwater quality evaluation

Abstract

The weight parameter plays an important role in groundwater quality assessment. Importance scale weighting model (ISWM) and entropy weighting model (EWM) are the most common weighing models in conventional literatures. However, ISWM is significantly by the experts’ subjective cognitions, which makes it difficult to generate a unique weight parameter and water quality index (WQI). EWM often neglects the indicator with a serious pollution condition, which makes the assessment result overoptimistic. To solve this problem, this study designs a new health risk weighting model (HRWM). For the pollutant with a higher health risk, a larger weight is assigned; and vice versa. And then, HRWM is applied into the groundwater quality evaluation of Jiamusi City as an illustration. The result shows that HRWM keeps the uniqueness of the weight parameter and the final WQI result, and avoids the overoptimistic phenomenon in assessment result. The groundwater quality of Jiamusi City is under a medium degree of threat or impairment. To further improve the groundwater quality, the environmental managers should adopt more measures to decrease the manganese in the water resources area.

Keywords:

• groundwater quality assessment
• health risk weighting model
• Jiamusi City

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Water Resource Department of Hunan Government (No. 201524507).