Delineation of Groundwater Potential Zone Through Geospatial Technique, Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, And Analytical Hierarchy Process

Abstract

Study Region: This study area is located in a subtropical semi-arid climatic zone of India, suffering due to the low availability of water. Hence, delineation of the groundwater potential zone (GWPZ) had performed through the geospatial technique, the multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). Study Focus: The thematic-layers of the geology, geomorphology, soil types, lineament-density, the slope of the topography, drainage-density, land-use, and land-cover developed and created by utilizing available supplementary data and digital satellite images. GWPZ had classified into 5 classes like excellent, good, moderate, poor, and very-poor. The summary of the methodology adopted for the delineation of GWPZ has given in fig-2.New Hydrological Insights for the Region: It had observed that the consistency index (CI) was 0.0106, while the random index (RI) for 7 variables considered from standard tables is 1.32. The calculated consistency ratio (CR) in this study was 0.0080 lower than 0.1000. This low CR indicated moderate consistency in the results of pairwise comparisons among the thematic layers assigned weight for analysis. Hence, the AHP model used for this research work has shown reasonably good accuracy. The statistics of GWPZ indicated ~3.97% of study-area possessed excellent GWPZ, ~37.09% very-good, ~41.72% moderate, ~15.23% poor, and ~1.99% very-poor. This model of the GWP map shows that the Area Under the Curve (AUC) of the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (ROC) is ~0.726. It indicated good agreement between experimental results and predicted results.