A study on water resources consumption by principal component analysis in Qingtongxia irrigation areas of Yinchuan Plain, China

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a valid method used for data compression and information extraction in water resources. PCA finds linear combinations of the original measurement variables that describe the significant variations in the data. In this paper, PCA is used to extract three principle components from 12 factors such as population size (PS), value of industrial output (VIO), gross output value of agriculture (GVA), sown area of rice (SAR), sown area of wheat (SAW), sown area of corn (SAC), agricultural water consumption (AWC), industrial water consumption (IWC), urban water consumption (UWC), rural people and livestock water consumption (RPLWC), annual water amount (AWA), annual water discharge amount (AWDA) which reflect the status of water resources consumption in Yinchuan Plain, China, and our calculations show that the comprehensive scores of water resources consumption is dropping year by year during 1996-2002. The result shows that the use of water resources in Yinchuan Plain is faced with a lot of pressure. This paper has testified the scientific nature of PCA, and provided evidence for decision-making of rational use of regional water resource.