Assessment of Geostatistical Methods for Determining Distribution Patterns of Groundwater Resources in Sari-Neka Coastal Plain, Northern Iran

This study aimed to evaluate the temporal change and accuracy of interpolation techniques used for spatial zonation of two groundwater quantity parameters including water table and depth to water table over 11 years. The study was conducted based on the data collected from piezometric wells of Sari-Neka Plain in Mazandaran Province, Iran. The investigated methods included a set of geostatistical approaches involving simple Kriging, ordinary Kriging, Radial Basis Function (RBF), and a deterministic interpolation method called Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) with powers of 1 and 5. Subsequent to quality control and data normalization, the most appropriate variogram was chosen based on low RSS and high r2 while the most suitable interpolation technique was determined regarding the cross validation, Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Mean Bias Error (MBE). The results demonstrated that Simple Kriging was the most suitable method for zoning the depth to groundwater over the years 2001, 2006, and 2012. Meanwhile, the most suitable methods for zoning the water table included IDW with a power of 1for the year 2001, RBF for the year 2006, and IDW with a power of 5 for the year 2012. The important finding was that the interpolation methods showed a lower error for estimating water table than estimating depth to groundwater. This study also revealed a drop in water table in the study area over the 11 years’ period. Meanwhile, new water table classes have been added and extended between the years 2006 and 2012 that had not existed five years earlier. The highest water table losses were observed in three points at 13m depth to water table in the middle and northern parts of the study area.