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Assessing groundwater quality in Greece based on spatial and temporal analysis

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Abstract

The recent industrial growth together with the urban expansion and intensive agriculture in Greece has increased groundwater contamination in many regions of the country. In order to design successful remediation strategies and protect public health, it is very important to identify those areas that are most vulnerable to groundwater contamination. In this work, an extensive contamination database from monitoring wells that cover the entire Greek territory during the last decade (2000–2008) was used in order to study the temporal and spatial distribution of groundwater contamination for the most common and serious anionic and cationic trace element pollutants (heavy metals). Spatial and temporal patterns and trends in the occurrence of groundwater contamination were also identified highlighting the regions where the higher groundwater contamination rates have been detected across the country. As a next step, representative contaminated aquifers in Greece, which were identified by the above analysis, were selected in order to analyze the specific contamination problem in more detail. To this end, geostatistical techniques (various types of kriging, co-kriging, and indicator kriging) were employed in order to map the contaminant values and the probability of exceeding critical thresholds (set as the parametric values of the contaminant of interest in each case). The resulting groundwater contamination maps could be used as a useful tool for water policy makers and water managers in order to assist the decision-making process.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Greek Institute of Geology and Mineral Exploration (IGME) for providing the contaminant monitoring database used in this work.

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Correspondence to Zoi Dokou.

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Figure S1

Representative experimental and model variograms for the three test cases (Malia, Korinthiakos and Asopos) (GIF 21 kb)

High Resolution Image (TIF 36 kb)

Table 1

Statistics of concentration data for the three selected aquifers (Malia, Korinthiakos and Asopos) (DOC 27 kb)

Table 2

Measures of the estimation error for all kriging methods (OK, SK, DK and their co-kriging counterparts as well as indicator co-kriging ). (DOC 73 kb)

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Dokou, Z., Kourgialas, N.N. & Karatzas, G.P. Assessing groundwater quality in Greece based on spatial and temporal analysis. Environ Monit Assess 187, 774 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-015-4998-0

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