Water quality assessment: a case study in the Tuticorin district of Tamil Nadu in South India

ABSTRACT

A hydro-geochemical study for water-quality assessment was conducted in the Tuticorin region of Tamil Nadu in southern India during the pre- and post-monsoon seasons of 2022 and the water samples are examined to comply with BIS and WHO guidelines. In the present study, the values of TDS (75%), Mg (37.5%), and TH (25%) have exceeded the permissible limits namely 500, 100, and 600 mg/L, respectively. The WQI proposed by CCME is used to analyze water suitability. The Pearson correlation and principal component analysis are used to study the relationship between various physicochemical parameters and principal components of water quality, respectively. Piper & Gibbs diagrams are plotted to identify the water types and the main water type predicted by the piper plot is Ca-Mg-Cl-SO₄ which makes up 74.3% of the the samples studied. WQI suggests that 22.5% and 50.0% specimens have excellent water quality during pre and post-monsoon seasons, respectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Water quality index
• CCME
• principal component analysis
• Gibbs plot
• Piper Trilinear Diagram

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/1573062X.2024.2312525.