Modeling groundwater potential zones of Puruliya district, West Bengal, India using remote sensing and GIS techniques

Abstract

Remote sensing and geographical information system (RS-GIS) have become a leading tool for modeling and mapping of groundwater resources. An attempt has been made to delineate the groundwater potential zones of Puruliya district using the integrated RS-GIS and AHP techniques. All the themes and their features have been assigned weights according to their relative importance and their normalized weights were calculated after the hierarchical ranking by pair-wise comparison matrix of analytical hierarchy process (AHP). Groundwater potential map has been prepared through weighted overlay model in GIS environment after integrating all the thematic layers. The entire district has been classified into three different groundwater potential zones—high, moderate, and low. Greater portion of the study area (60.92%) fall within the moderate potentiality zone, about 22.55% and 16.53% of the total area fall under the high and low potential zone, respectively. Potential zones have been validated with the groundwater yield data, 10 out of 14 validation points (71.43%), matches with the expected yield classes. It shows that the applied method produces significantly reliable results for the present study which can help the decision makers to formulate an effective plan for the study area.