Abstract
Rapid population growth has raised the groundwater resources demand for socio-economic development in the Shatt Al-Arab basin. The sustainable management of groundwater resources requires precise quantitative evaluation, which can be achieved by applying scientific principles and modern techniques. An integrated concept has been used in the current study to identify the groundwater potential zones (GWPZs) in the Shatt Al-Arab basin using remote sensing (RS), geographic information system (GIS), and analytic hierarchy process (AHP). For this purpose, nine groundwater occurrence and movement controlling parameters (i.e., lithology, rainfall, geomorphology, slope, drainage density, soil, land use/land cover, distance to river, and lineament density) were prepared and transformed into raster data using ArcGIS software. These nine parameters (thematic layers) were allocated weights proportional to their importance. Furthermore, the hierarchical ranking was conducted using a pairwise comparison matrix of the AHP in order to estimate the final normalized weights of these layers. We used the overlay weighted sum technique to integrate the layers for the creation of the GWPZs map of the study area. The map has been categorized into five zones (viz., very good, good, moderate, poor, and very poor) representing 4, 51, 35, 9, and 1% of the study area, respectively. Finally, for assessing the effectiveness of the model, the GWPZs map was validated using depth to groundwater data for 99 wells distributed over the basin. The validation results confirm that the applied approach provides significantly solid results that can help in perspective planning and sustainable utilization of the groundwater resources in this water-stressed region.
Highlights
Surface water is generally scant in arid and semi-arid regions owing to low rainfall and high evaporation dominated in such regions [1]
The map of wells was projected on the groundwater potential zones (GWPZs) map to verify the effectiveness of the remote sensing (RS)-geographic information system (GIS) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP)-based method in demarcating GWPZs in the study area
The present study demonstrated that remote sensing, GIS, and AHP approaches are feasible tools for demarcating GWPZs in the trans-boundary Shatt Al-Arab basin
Summary
Surface water is generally scant in arid and semi-arid regions owing to low rainfall and high evaporation dominated in such regions [1]. Arid and semi-arid climatic environments are undergoing a growing surface water deficit across the world [2,3,4]. An arid to semi-arid region, is the most water-scarce zone in the world, with most of its countries falling under the international water poverty index set by the United Nations [7]. Among the Middle Eastern countries, Iraq and Iran are facing considerable water shortages across most parts of their territories. To safeguard the water resources in Iraq, the government has established a comprehensive groundwater monitoring program intending to improve the national scope in terms of exploration and management of the national groundwater
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