The use of Kriging Techniques within GIS Environment to Investigate Groundwater Quality in the Amman-Zarqa Basin/Jordan, Research Journal of Environmental and Earth Sciences

The Kriging techniques are called the best linear unbiased estimator since it tries to have a meanresidual error equal to zero. It aims to minimizing the variance of the errors and hence is a strong advantageover other estimation methods like inverse distance weighting or moving average. In this study, the ordinarykriging techniques were used to estimate groundwater quality parameters (Ca2+, Mg2+, Na+, K+, ClG and NO3G).It was found that the spatial interpolation of groundwater quality of the study area poses various problems dueto the complex impact of cultivation and urbanization systems of the study area. Testing of various methodsand parameters, by comparing and ranking their cross-correlation errors, show that ordinary kriging methodusing the different semivariogram models provides the overall good results. Also, most of the groundwaterquality parameters have moderate spatial structure except NO3 and Ca that have a strong spatial structure.