Abstract

Drinking water supply to rural communities is increasingly relying on finding groundwater. However, groundwater resources, although believed to be safe and free of pollution, are subjects to local and diffusive pollution. This work aims at assessing the groundwater quality in the Lobo catchment area in Nibéhibé and addressing the mineralization phenomena. To achieve such an objective, a statistical approach was applied to physical-chemical analyses data recorded from two sampling campaigns during the dry and rainy seasons, respectively. The adopted approach consisted first in performing comparative analysis, second in investigating the chemical specificities within the water classes using the piper diagram, and lastly in classifying the water based on their physical-chemical similarities using the Kohonen Self-Organized Map (SOM). The reported results disclose that the investigated groundwater is acidic and weakly mineralized during rainy and dry seasons. The diagram of Piper revealed the waters are mostly chlorinated, sulphated, and calco-magnesian type. The SOM method was used to highlight water pollution especially the acid hydrolysis of rock minerals.

Key words: Characterization, spatio-temporal, physico-chemical quality, groundwater, Lobo watershed, Côte d’Ivoire.