A Multivariate Analysis of Groundwater Chemistry Data

Groundwater serves as the main source of water for drinking and other domestic purposes, and often it is over exploited. Nowadays, it is facing threats due to anthropogenic activities. In this study, a total of 20 groundwater samples from boreholes used for drinking, and other domestic purposes were collected from Hadejia town northeastern Jigawa State, Nigeria, and analyzed for their physicochemical characteristics and trace metal levels using standard methods aimed at assessing the groundwater quality. The well-founded techniques of principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis (CA) were jointly used. PCA was used to investigate the origin of each water quality parameters and yielded five varimax factors/components with 78.69% total variance in the groundwater quality data. First two factors reveal that 47.69% of the total variance dominated by total hardness, TDS, Cl−, NO3−, Cu, EC, Fe, and Cr indicating the major variations are related to anthropogenic activities and natural processes. Cluster analysis results grouped the 15 parameters and 20 sampling sites into two and four statistically significant clusters, respectively, based on their similarities. The results showed that concentrations of Mn, Cr, and Pb are slightly higher above the maximum permissible limit of Nigerian standard for drinking water quality (NSDWQ, Nigerian Industrial Standard. NIS 554, Nigerian Standard for Drinking Water Quality (NSDWQ). (2007). Nigerian Industrial Standard (NIS) 554:2007 ICs 13.060.20.) and hence the need for the replacement of the affected wells.