Assessing the Water Qualily in Buriganga River Applying Water Quality Index, Clustering and GIS

Bangladesh is recognized as a riverine country throughout the world. The Buriganga flowing beside the Dhaka city is the most salient river. In contrast with the past, it is one of the most contaminated rivers in Bangladesh. The majority of the industries and factories of Dhaka are on the bank of the river and they are polluting its water every day. In this paper, a research is carried out to determine and visualize the contamination level of water of the river using Geographical Information System (GIS) and clustering technique. The Water Quality Index (WQI) and the clustering approach are used to categorize the pollution levels of various monitoring stations of the river. Monitoring stations, clustered into different pollution levels, are visualized using GIS mapping. According to the obtained WQI values, three symbolic groups named less polluted, moderately and highly polluted sites are observed.