Source apportionment of groundwater pollution in a city's eastern part using multivariate statistical techniques

This study was carried out to assess the overall water quality and identify major chlorinated hydrocarbon variables affecting the groundwater quality. The source apportionment of groundwater pollution is important for the efficient management of groundwater resources.Based on 13 variables surveyed at 43 monitoring sites,the comprehensive application of different multivariate methods were used for determining source apportionment of groundwater chlorinated hydrocarbon pollutants in study area. Factor analysis and cluster analysis were applied to the identification of pollution sources and four potential pollution sources that explained 92.810% of the total variance were identified.The absolute principal component score-multiple linear regression was adopted to calculate the contribution of each pollution source. Regression results revealed that most variables were primarily influenced by chemical industry,electrical manufacturing,chemical fiber and agricultural source.The contributions of each pollution source to the entire study area were 43%, 32%, 14% and 11% respectively.