A new analytical method using Back-Propagation(BP)artificial neural network and kinetic spectrophotometry for simultaneous determination of iron and magnesium in tap water,the Yellow River water and seawater is established.By conditional experiments,the optimum analytical conditions and parameters are obtained.Levenberg-Marquart(L-M)algorithm is used for calculation in BP neural network.The topological structure of three-layer BP ANN network architecture is chosen as 15-16-2(nodes).The initial value of gradient coefficientμ is fixed at 0.001 and the increase factor and reduction factor ofμ take the default values of the system.The data are processed by computers with our own programs written in MATLAB 7.0.The relative standard deviation of the calculated results for iron and manganese is 2.30％ and 2.67％ respectively.The results of standard addition method show that for the tap water,the recoveries of iron and manganese are in the ranges of 98.0％-104.3％ and 96.5％-104.5％,and the RSD is in the range of 0.23％-0.98％;for the Yellow River water(Lijin district of Shandong Province),the recoveries of iron and manganese are in the ranges of 96.0％-101.0％ and 98.7％-104.2％,and the RSD is in the range of 0.13％-2.52％;for the seawater in Qingdao offshore,the recoveries of iron and manganese are in the ranges of 95.3％-104.8％ and 95.3％-104.7％,and the RSD is in the range of 0.14％-2.66％.It is found that 21 common cations and anions do not interfere with the determination of iron and manganese under the optimum experimental conditions.This method exhibits good reproducibility and high accuracy in the determination of iron and manganese and can be used for the simultaneous determination of iron and manganese in tap water and natural water.By using the established ANN-catalytic spectrophotometric method,the iron and manganese concentrations of the surface seawater at 11 sites in Qingdao offshore are determined and the level distribution maps of iron and manganese are drawn.