Design Of A Groundwater Level Monitoring Network For Urumqi River Area, China

With the rapidly industrial process, the shortage of water resource, being faced by many countries and areas, has become one of conditional factors in the development of society. How to make use of water resource properly and protect natural environment have been universally concerned. Groundwater is a vital natural resource for the economic and secure provision of potable water supply in both urban and rural environments, and plays a fundamental role in human well-being, as well as that of many aquatic ecosystems. Worldwide, aquifers are experiencing an increasing threat of excessive abstraction for urbanization, industrial development, agricultural activeties.The catchment area of the Urumqi River can be divided into 3 distinct topographic zones. Passing from upstream to downstream, these are the Chaiwopu Basin, the Urumqi valley,the Reiver Plain area. Urumqi river which length is 200km, the main river of study area, originates from the local peaks of the Tianshan Mountains in the south, passes through Urumqi city, and finally enters the Jugger Basin in the north . Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region, lies in the middle section of the river basin. Because it locates in the aridity area and the Urumqi river is inland river, the shortage of water resource is the main problem. So it is necessary for us to monitor groundwater better(see [1]).The objective of this study is to design a suitable groundwater level monitoring network from which the information about groundwater heads can be collected, and interpreted for sustainable development of groundwater resources and hence protection of environment. This was achieved by Geographical Information System (GIS) based procedure, the Kriging approach was employed for interpolate the unknown values from the observed ones and also simulate the Kriging standard deviation of estimation error, which was used as the measure of the accuracy for groundwater monitoring network optimization. The network density was determined after the kriging approach for the design of the groundwater network.Time series analysis of groundwater levels from observation wells selected from the database suggested a sampling frequency of one measurements per month at least is suitable for estimation of trend, seasonal fluctuation and mean of groundwater time series in Urumqi river area.In conclusion, regular monitoring of groundwater levels in Urumqi river area should continue to guarantee long-time series for analysis of groundwater level changes with time. Increasing the monitoring budget over the entire network in the study area may be difficult but it is highly recommended because it is directly related to an increase in the accuracu of the groundwater monitoring network.