Water and Sediment Load Quality of Wadi El-Walah Floods, Jordan

Abstract

That research dealt with investigating the quality and quantity groundwater and surface water that could be captured by a proposed water harvesting dam in Wadi El-Walah watershed located 40 kilometers south of Amman city near the city of Madaba. Water samples were collected from floods during winter season and from springs and wells during summer season to identify water quality variation between winter and summer and study the interaction of such water with the available rocks and soils. Selected soil and rock samples were also collected from exposed soils and rocks in the study area along with the sediment transport separated from flood samples and were subjected to grounding and x-ray diffraction analysis to identify their mineral composition. That lead to the quality, quantity, and sources of minerals in the sediment load captured by the proposed dam. The dam was constructed few years later based on that and other water related studies.