Geospatial technology for delineating groundwater potential zones in Doddahalla watershed of Chitradurga district, India

Groundwater is one of the valuable natural resources which determines the health of a human being in an area. The present research investigated the hydrogeological determinants to assess the sensitivity of each factor to the infiltration pattern and to map the regional groundwater potential zone for the semi-arid watershed in Karnataka, India using a geographic information system (GIS) and satellite remote sensing. It was one of the driest and water scarcest regions in the country. Groundwater potential zones are demarcated by integrating the highly impacting thematic layers such as land use, soil texture and depth, rainfall, slope, drainage density, lineament and geomorphology. The thematic layers are prepared from the remote sensing satellite images, ground truth data and available secondary data. Cartosat-1 CartoDEM (30 m), IRS P6 LISS III (24 m) and Landsat 8 (30 m), SOI toposheet (57 B/7, 57 B/8, 57 B/11, 57 B/12, 57 B/15 and57 B/16) and high resolution satellite images from Google Earth were used for the preparation of thematic maps. ArcGIS software was utilized to manipulate these data sets. Weight is assigned to each class for each thematic map according to their characteristic and interrelationship with groundwater. All the thematic layers are integrated into a GIS domain, and assigned weight values are added for each polygon in the attribute table. Then each polygon is classified a groundwater zone into five different subclasses according to the gained weight value. Only 15% of the total land area is rich with groundwater resources. More than 70% of the total land area is moderate to poor with groundwater resources.