Author(s)

Qais Al-Madhlom¹, Nadhir Al-Ansari¹, Hussain M. Hussain²

¹Civil, Environmental and Natural Resources Engineering, Lulea University of Technology, Lulea, Sweden.
²Department of Geology, College of Science, Kufa University, Najaf, Iraq.

Groundwater is one of the main resources from the earth, especially for arid or semiarid countries. For this reason, it is very important to keep it unpolluted. Drastic Model is one of the widely used models to detect groundwater vulnerability to the contaminants that are found on ground surface. In this model, it is assumed that the vulnerability of the groundwater is affected by seven hydrological parameters. They are: depth from the surface ground to groundwater, net recharge into the aquifer from the surface, aquifer media, soil media, area topography, impact of vadose zone and aquifer hydraulic conductivity. In this study, the DRASTIC model was applied on the northern part of Babylon governorate in Iraq, to predict the vulnerability of Groundwater in that area. The results indicate that the vulnerability is very low to low grade.

Groundwater Vulnerability, Groundwater Sensitivity, DRASTIC Model, GIS, Babylon, Iraq

Al-Madhlom, Q. , Al-Ansari, N. and Hussain, H. (2016) Assessment of Groundwater Vulnerability in Northern Babylon Governorate, Iraq. Engineering, 8, 883-902. doi: 10.4236/eng.2016.812080.