Short-term forecasting of the chloride content in the mineral waters of the Ustroń Health Resort using SARIMA and Holt-Winters models

Abstract

The Ustroń S.A. Health Resort (southern Poland) uses iodide-bromide mineral waters taken from Middle and Upper Devonian limestones and dolomites with a mineralisation range of 110-130 g/dm3 for curative purposes. Two boreholes - U-3 and U3-A drilled in the early 1970s were exploited. The aim of this paper is to estimate changes in mineral water quality of the Ustroń Health Resort by taking into consideration chloride content in the water from the U-3 borehole. The data has included the results of monthly analyses of chlorides from 2005 to 2015 during the tests carried out by the Mining Department of the Health Resort. The triple exponential smoothing (ETS) function and the Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) method of modelling time series were used for the calculations. The ability to properly forecast mineral water quality can result in a good status of the exploitation borehole and a limited number of failures in the exploitation system. Because of the good management of health resorts, it is possible to acquire more satisfied customers. The main goal of the article involves the real-time forecast accuracy, obtained results show that the proposed methods are effective for such situations. Presented methods made it possible to obtain a 24-month point and interval forecast. The results of these analyses indicate that the chloride content is forecast to be in the range of 72 to 83 g/l from 2015 to 2017. While comparing the two methods of analysis, a narrower range of forecast values and, therefore, greater accuracy were obtained for the ETS function. The good performance of the ETS model highlights its utility compared with complicated physically based numerical models.