Groundwater resources evaluation using geospatial technology

Groundwater is water located beneath the ground surface in soil pore spaces and in the fractures of lithologic formations. The advent of remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) has opened up new vistas in groundwater prospect evaluation, exploration, and management. This paper mainly deals with the integrated approach of remote sensing and GIS to delineate groundwater potential zones in of parts of Palar basin. Digitized vector maps pertaining to chosen parameters, namely, geomorphology, geology, land use/land cover, lineament, relief, and drainage, were converted to raster data using 23 m2 (76 ft2) grid cell size. The raster maps of these parameters were assigned to their respective theme weight and class weights. The individual theme weight was multiplied by its respective class weight, and then all the raster thematic layers were aggregated in a linear combination equation in ArcMap GIS Raster Calculator module. Moreover, the weighted layers were statistically modeled to get the areal extent of groundwater prospects with respect to each thematic layer. The final result depicts the favorable prospective zones in the study area and can be helpful to better plan exploration and management.