Seawater intrusion vulnerability evaluation and prediction: a case study of Qeshm Island, Iran

Seawater intrusion is one of the most serious issues to threaten coastal aquifers. Tourian aquifer, which is selected as the case study, is located in Qeshm Island, Persian Gulf. In this study, first the vulnerability of the region to seawater intrusion is assessed using chloride ion concentration value, then by using the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, the vulnerability of the region is predicted for 14 wells in 2018. The results show that the Tourian aquifer experiences moderate vulnerability and the area affected by seawater intrusion is wide and is in danger of expanding. It is also found that 0.95 km2 of the region is in a state of high vulnerability with Cl concentration being in a dangerous condition. The prediction model shows that ARIMA (2,1,1) is the best model with mean absolute error of 13.3 mg/L and Nash–Sutcliffe value of 0.81. For fitted and predicted data, mean square error is evaluated as 235.3 and 264.3, respectively. The prediction results show that vulnerability is increasing through the years.