1. Introduction

The State of Kuwait is located at the northwestern side of the Arabian Gulf and occupies an area of about 18,000 km<sup>2</sup> . Kuwait is bordered on the north and west by Iraq and on the south

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© The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The climate is extremely hot and dry in summer and mild-tocold in winter. The rainfall is scarce and limited to the period from October to May. The highest ever temperature recorded in Kuwait was 54C on July 2016. The average annual precipitation recorded during the period 2001–2016 is 114.5 mm. It lies within an arid-semiarid zone lacking renewable surface water. The natural water resources are the brackish groundwater located in the Kuwait Group and the Dammam Formation aquifers, which have been utilized since 1953 on a small scale and for limited purpose, but with increasing population and growth of demands, the production of groundwater embarked on a wide scale project to provide consumers with it through a separate pipe network. This groundwater is used for blending with distilled water for fresh water production, irrigation and landscaping plus household purposes, livestock watering, and construction works. The present total output installed capacity of groundwater wells is around 145 MIGD, meanwhile the maximum consumption hit 114.6 MIGD. However, the demand for water in Kuwait is met from three sectors: desalination, brackish groundwater, and tertiary treated waste water.

The Al-Atraf field is one of the brackish groundwater fields and is located southwest of Kuwait between 29 18 to 29 24 north latitudes and 47 31 to 47 38 east longitudes. The area under study is about 87.75 km<sup>2</sup> and includes 83 water wells, producing groundwater from the Kuwait Group aquifer, where the nominal production capacity is 30 MIGPD. The salinity of the aquifer ranges from 3504 to 6366 mg/l, with an average value of 4441 mg/l.
