Abstract
The electrical resistivity survey has been very successful for decades in delineating prospective groundwater zones around the world. In general, the method is used to decipher the horizontal and vertical electrical resistivity distribution of the subsurface earth’s layers. In the perspective of hydrogeology, understanding the subsurface conditions and lithological variations is quite necessary to target groundwater potential zones. One-dimensional (1D) geoelectrical resistivity survey, vertical electrical sounding (VES), was carried out in selected locations across the Nagavathi watershed, Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu in India. The Nagavathi watershed is positioned in an undulated terrain and is dominantly underlain by charnockite and gneissic rocks. Forty-six VES using Schlumberger’s electrode arrangement were conducted over the entire Nagavathi watershed, using an equal grid method. The field data were processed by IPI2 Windows software and different types of sounding curves were identified. The lineaments such as faults, joints, and fractures act as pathways to groundwater movement, major lineaments were identified from satellite data using ArcGIS 9.3. In the study area consisting of hard rocks, groundwater prospecting is a difficult task without proper understanding of subsurface lithology. From the VES results, geoelectric layers such as topsoil, weathered, fractured, and infinitely hard rock layers were identified and eight thematic maps involving spatial distribution of resistivities and thickness were prepared, in addition to geology, hydrogeomorphology, and lineament thematic layers. The combination of the eleven thematic layers in ArcGIS resulted in a groundwater potential map, providing the information about very good (75.799 km2), good (85.595 km2), medium (134.240 km2), poor (115.124 km2), and very poor (69.336 km2) groundwater possible zones.
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