Groundwater Quality Studies in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Prevalent Research and Management Dimensions

Abstract

Groundwater is a valuable resource because it is widely used for drinking, and for domestic, agricultural, and industrial purposes. Globally, Saudi Arabia is known to be one of the driest regions with scarce water resources. The shallow groundwater near the major cities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is becoming polluted because of industrial effluent discharge, use of fertilizers in agriculture and domestic sewerage in the region. This review tries to focus on groundwater quality problems due to anthropogenic or geogenic sources in the region of Saudi Arabia. In this paper, we focus on different water-quality variables, for groundwater quality evaluation and aquifer vulnerability assessment due to pollutants/contaminants present in groundwater. The current study gives a holistic understanding of different groundwater quality problems and therefore identifies the gaps of the previous studies and identifies the viewpoints of the future research dimensions. We describe the different groundwater quality problems related to toxicities of the fluoride, nitrate, and heavy metals and radionuclides in Saudi Arabia. A majority of the groundwater pollutants are of natural origin, but there is significant wastewater effluent discharge in the region that is also responsible for contamination of aquifers with heavy metals.