Abstract

Bangladesh has been facing serious problem in arsenic contamination for more than two decades. Drinking and irrigating contaminated water put the health of more than 85 million people at risk. The project “Groundwater Studies for Arsenic Contamination in
Bangladesh” led by British Geological Survey had been conducted during 1998 to 2001. A few studies have been carried out from different perspectives. The district Comilla is considered to be the most severed region with highest arsenic-related deaths according
to Flanagan, Johnston, and Zheng, 2012.

In this thesis, we examine the arsenic groundwater concentration in Comilla district. We propose spatial models for making inference under Bayesian framework. We demonstrate that models based on the gamma distribution with spatial structure capture the characteristics of arsenic levels, appropriately compared to other models. We also perform spatial interpolation (kriging) to describe the situation of the arsenic levels across all Comilla.