Assessment of Water Quality by RSM and ANP: A Case Study in Tripura,India

Abstract

Assessment of water quality is essential to check suitability of water for use in various purposes. Indexing is a practical and concise way of representing the overall quality of water. Many such indexing methods are available with different goal and purpose. For indexing purpose importance of different Water Quality Parameters needs to be determined first. In the present study, importance of Water Quality Parameters were determined on the basis of important criteria like potential hazards, cost of mitigation, utilization scope and popularity among the researchers. The importance of criteria were determined by Response Surface Methodology (RSM), whereas the scoring of importance was performed by Analytic Network Process (ANP). For validation of the proposed index, a case study was performed by water quality data of different water bodies in Tripura, India. The proposed Water Quality Index of the sample water bodies were then compared with the Water Quality Indices of National Sanitation Foundation (NSF WQI). Results indicate that the proposed index is very close to NSF WQI. Thus the proposed index seems to be successful in expressing the overall quality of water.