Study of selected influential criteria on groundwater potential storage using geospatial technology and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach: A case study

Abstract

Analytical hierarchical process (AHP) is nowadays a very popular tool in multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in the groundwater suitability zone assessment. The present study involves the selection of six major influencing criteria, i.e., land use and land cover, drainage density, normalized difference vegetation index, lineament density, groundwater fluctuation, and the slope. Using remotely sensed data in a GIS environment, various thematic layers are generated. Suitable weights are assigned to these criteria using Saaty’s scale as well as reclassification and ranking scores are also done to sub-criteria. Accordingly, consistency checks are also done to the weights applied to all the criteria. The weighted overlay technique is adopted under ArcGIS environment. Generated groundwater potential zone (GWPZ) map, illustrates five classified zones (1–5) of groundwater potentials, where 1 is representative of very poor prospects zone (10.9%), and 5 is indicative of excellent storage zones (37.8%).