Discrimination of potential groundwater areas using remote sensing, gravity and aeromagnetic data in Rey Bouba and environs, North Cameroon

Abstract

Groundwater exploration is required in semi-arid to arid areas especially where the public water supply network is not available due to the lack of funds. The National Development Strategy of Cameroon 2020–2030 (NDS30) highly supports the sustainable development of each region from its own natural resources. In this regard, this study aims at the identification of potential groundwater resources from the application of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to remote sensing, gravity and aeromagnetic data in Rey Bouba and Environs. First and foremost, several critical parameters such as surface line density, gravity line density, magnetic line density, drainage density, slope, rainfall, topographic wetness index, topographic roughness index, soil, land use land cover and normalized digital vegetation index, were generated, assigned weights and merged to obtain the groundwater potential of the study area. As a result, 24.8 % of the study area exhibits very low and low groundwater potential while 71.93 % of the study area has moderate groundwater potential water. High and very high groundwater potential zones cumulate 3.27 % of the research area. Accordingly, considerable potential groundwater resources were identified in the vicinity of Sagdje, Bandjoukri, and Tchollire. The correlation of existing wells with the groundwater potential map shows that most productive wells are connected with moderate groundwater potential zones while most unproductive wells are linked to low groundwater potential areas. Furthermore, 3 profiles extracted from the potential field data were used to realize the 2D geological modeling. Hence, the subsurface geological architecture of the study area shows that the depth to the top of the basement or the depth to the bottom of the sedimentary cover varies from 100 to 2600 m, 100–2700 m and 0–1400 m for profiles P₁, P₂, and P₃, respectively.