Investigation the Spatial Variability of Some Important Groundwater Quality Factors in Guilan, Iran

Guilan is a famous province in growing rice in Iran. Recently, due to shortage of water, farmer's desire to use groundwater in order to grow rice in northern part of Iran has been increasing rapidly. The fact that rice is sensitive to water quality, caused concern about rice cultivation sustainability in the area, especially in drought years. This study was done to investigate the spatial variability of some important ground water quality factors including EC, SAR and Na of samples taken from 135 wells over the region during the summer of 2007. First, the accuracy of Kriging (Ok) and Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) with 3 different powers (1, 2 and 3) in mapping the studied parameters were evaluated. Then the final map was presented. The result showed that spherical model gave the best result to simulate the Vriograms. Although negligible difference was observed between the methods, Ok and IDW1 performed better in comparison to the IDW2 and IDW3. The final map showed that Ec in central part of the region, where the Sepidrod River meets the Caspian Sea is dramatically high which will threaten the sustainability of rice cultivation in the area. The other factors were in suitable level.