Resumen
Until now, there was no simple procedure to test the performance of water quality indices (WQIs) or, in other words, to perform their meta-evaluation. The purpose of this study is to provide a meta-evaluation approach of two widely used WQIs and suggestions for selecting one or both of them for application in groundwater quality assessment as proposed by the European Union. The meta-evaluation concept is based on testing the performance of two widely known WQIs by applying classification of Water Framework Directive (WFD; 2000/60/EC) and Groundwater Directive (GWD; 2006/118/EC) which was used as a reference. The Canadian Council of Ministers of Environment (CCME) and National Sanitation Foundation (NSF-WQI) have been selected for evaluation. These WQIs were applied in an agricultural area of the Mediterranean region where six sub-datasets for an entire hydrological year were available. This study uses all the available water quality data (52 monitoring stations × 2 sampling periods × 15 parameters) which is systematically collected at the area studied. The CCME-WQI is a rather strict index since it estimates statistically significantly lower values than the NSF-WQI. Based on the performance of the examined indices, it is shown that, mostly, the CCME-WQI classification findings are close to those of the GWD.