Assessing Water Quality in the Developing World: An Index for Mexico City
11 abril 2012
Fabiola S. Sosa-Rodriguez
Chapter 22. Water Quality Monitoring and Assessment
pp 495-508
ISBN: 978-953-51-0486-5
People’s access to safe water must be assured to guarantee healthy life. To this end, monitoring and assessing the quality of the water that people receive must be an essential component of water management. New methods that support effective water quality management need to be design and implemented. This chapter proposes a method to evaluate the effectiveness of water management in providing safe water, using as an example a study case of Mexico City.
A water quality management index (WQI) was estimated by principal component analysis. The results were normalized and transformed into decimal units to simplify the data into a language that decision makers can easily understand. Since the quality of the water supply in this city varies among its neighborhoods, it was necessary to identify the distribution and location of the most vulnerable groups using an ad hoc Geographical Information System (GIS).
