Groundwater potential mapping at Kurdistan region of Iran using analytic hierarchy process and GIS

Abstract

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) as an advantageous tool has been applied by various researchers to improve their management ability. Management of groundwater resource, especially under data-scarce and arid areas, encountered a lot of problems and issues which drives the planers to use of MCDA. In this research, a standard methodology has been applied to delineate groundwater resource potential zonation based on integrated analytical hierarchy process (AHP), geographic information system (GIS), and remote sensing (RS) techniques in Kurdistan plain, Iran. At first, the effective thematic layers on the groundwater potential such as rainfall, lithology, drainage density, lineament density, and slope percent were derived from the spatial geodatabase. Then, the assigned weights of thematic layers based on expert knowledge were normalized by eigenvector technique of AHP. To prepare the groundwater potential index, the weighted linear combination (WLC) method was applied in GIS. Finally, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was drawn for groundwater potential map, and the area under curve (AUC) was computed. Results indicated that the rainfall and slope percent factors have taken the highest and lowest weights, respectively. Validation of results showed that the AHP method (AUC = 73.66 %) performed fairly good predication accuracy. Such findings revealed that in the regions suffering from data scarcity through the MCDM methodology, the planners would be able to having accurate knowledge on groundwater resources based on geospatial data analysis. Therefore, the developing scenario for future planning of groundwater exploration can be achieved in an efficient manner.