Groundwater Management In An Area Of Po Valley Using Criteria Based On Water Quality

The most recent Italian laws, related to water management, state that groundwater constitutes a public property and drinking water usage has the highest priority. They also fix the Maximum Allowable Concentration and the Guide Value. Considering these limits and choosing four chemical and physical parameters and four undesirable substances, the values sampled in a groundwater system can be elaborated in order to characterize andmap three different zones of the aquifer in accordance with the basic water quality. The considered parameters are among the most representative of natural quality and extensive anthropogenic contamination in groundwater and, at the same time, are easily measurable. In this paper an application of the classification methodology to the aquifer of Modena Plain (Northern Italy) is reported. The monitoring network of the water quality is made up by about 190 wells evenly distributed on an area of about 1200 km2. The study has been repeated on data collected in two seasons (spring and autumn) of 1993-94-95. The results show a modest variability of the qualitative levels of the groundwater system in good accordance with the observed quasi-stationarity of the flow conditions.