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The role of agricultural activity for ammonium contamination at a riverbank filtration site in central Delhi (India)

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Abstract

At a riverbank filtration (RBF) site in central Delhi unusually high and strongly fluctuating ammonium (NH4 +) concentrations were measured in the groundwater. Sewage contaminated river water has been identified as the main source of the NH4 + plume. However, the well field is located within an irrigated agricultural area and irrigation return flow might have an additional impact on the groundwater contamination. To quantify the role of irrigation return flow, sediments of the vadose zone were characterized concerning their hydraulic and sorption characteristics, and x-ray diffraction for clay mineral analyses and laboratory column studies were conducted with representative sediments. The sediments range between silt and fine-medium sand with calculated hydraulic conductivities between 2.1 × 10−4 and 1.0 × 10−7 m/s and a cation exchange capacity between 0.9 and 37.2 meq/100 g sediment. The column experiments show that NH4 + retardation through cation exchange is the main process occurring in the sediments. Contrary to the results of similar experiments conducted with sediments from the saturated zone, mass balances reveal that NH4 + fixation or degradation also takes place in significant amounts and up to 0.09 meq NH4 +/100 g sediment were transformed this way. This indicates that irrigation return flow can be neglected as a major source of NH4 + at the field site. Instead the NH4 + fixation or degradation in the unsaturated zone might be one reason for the observed variations of NH4 + concentrations in the groundwater.

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Acknowledgments

This research was done in the frame of SAPH PANI, an EU funded project about the improvement of natural water treatment systems in water stressed urban and peri- urban areas in India (EU Grant agreement no: 282911), co-funded by Veolia Eau. The authors would like to thank the Delhi Jal Board for supporting the work at the Delhi field site by giving drilling and sampling permissions and by sharing and discussing data. We would like to thank everyone who contributed to the study: Shams Ul Haq, Vikas Gupta and Christoph Sprenger for supporting the field work in Delhi and Theresa Frommen, Mario Eybing and Sajil Kumar for their support with the lab work in Berlin. Figure 3 was created by Theresa Frommen. Clay mineral analyses were conducted at the Technische Universität Berlin. We would like to thank Cordelia Lange and Ralf Mielke for their help with the clay mineral analyses and the discussions about the results. Thank you to the reviewers for their constructive comments which helped greatly in improving the manuscript.

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  1. Kompetenzzentrum Wasser Berlin gGmbH, Cicerostr. 24, 10709, Berlin, Germany

    Maike Groeschke & Gesche Grützmacher

  2. Hydrogeology Group, Freie Universität Berlin, Malteserstr. 74-100, 12249, Berlin, Germany

    Maike Groeschke, Andreas Winkler & Michael Schneider

  3. Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India

    Pradeep Kumar

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  1. Maike Groeschke
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Correspondence to Maike Groeschke.

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Groeschke, M., Kumar, P., Winkler, A. et al. The role of agricultural activity for ammonium contamination at a riverbank filtration site in central Delhi (India). Environ Earth Sci 75, 129 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-015-4977-3

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