Assessment of the potential areas for underground dam construction in Roomeshgan, Lorestan province, Iran

One of the methods for dealing with the problem of water shortage and the decline of groundwater levels in the arid areas is the construction of underground dams. It is difficult to make a decision about suitable locations for the construction of underground dams because of the necessity to consider numerous factors. Some of these criteria are hydrological, geological and geomorphologic characteristics of the area. By applying the GIS and AHP methods, this study attempted to introduce the suitable locations for construction of underground dams in Roomeshgan area in Lorestan Province, Iran. For this purpose, factors such as slope, lithology, land use, alluvium thickness, water quality, and distance from the well, fault and stream and rivers network were used. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for the possibility of considering various qualitative and quantitative criteria, the process can be one way to select the appropriate location for constructing an underground dam. In this study, after the assessment of the used layers in the Expert Choice software, weight mapping of each layer was prepared. Then, the map of suitable areas for construction of the underground dam was prepared by overlapping the weight mappings of each layer in ArcGIS software. According to the results, 15.87 %, 11.96 %, 35.75 %, 33.23 % and 3.18 % of the region are located in very poor, poor, moderate, suitable and very suitable areas, respectively. After several field surveys of the area with three percent, six locations were selected for underground dam construction. The results show that the factors mentioned above have the most important role in locating the underground dam construction and the chosen method has high accuracy.