Identifying Suitable Location for Surface Rainwater Harvesting Using GIS and Analytical Hierarchy Process

Abstract Rainwater harvesting is old but auspicious technology of sustainable water resource management. In general, the immediate barriers for installing rainwater harvesting techniques is a universal problem which includes the availability of suitable place, initial cost, lack of desired, sound technology etc. The present paper mainly focuses on finding suitable locations for surface rainwater harvesting structures, validation and characterization of these areas using GIS and AHP methods. For validation and characterization of the location google earth and associated thematic layers have been used. The identification of appropriate locations for RWH structures for the Asansol Urban Area in Paschim Burdwan district of West Bengal has been made by utilizing eight different thematic layers in GIS environment. Different GIS layers such as surface elevation, land-use/land-cover, drainage, depression, geology, slope, rainfall and lineament have been used for identifying the suitable location. The result of the study depicts that most of the identified locations as high (10.62%) and very high (4.12%) are suitable for constructing any kind of natural or manmade RWH structure. The present method is comparatively cost effective and time saving which may be convenient for sustainable water resource management planning across the water scarce area in the world.