Groundwater Potential Zone Mapping using Geo-spatial Tools for Watersheds in Upper Bhima Basin, Pune, India

Abstract

Water is one of the primary requirements of any region for sustainable economic development. There are number of limitations regarding availability of surface and subsurface water due to various reasons, hence exploration of groundwater becomes inevitable. Main objective of this study was to map groundwater potential zones for study area using geospatial tools; which comprises of watersheds in Upper Bhima Basin, Pune district. The primary groundwater controlling factors considered are geomorphology, soil, land use land cover, slope, drainage density and lineament density; for which respective maps were prepared using satellite image, toposheets and incidental data. Maps for various layers according to above said controlling factors were generated from different data collected. Finally these thematic layers were integrated using ArcGIS software to prepare groundwater potential zone map for the study area. Groundwater potential zones were marked as ‘very poor, ‘poor’, ‘moderate’, ‘good’ and ‘very good’, based on knowledge based weightage factor. This, geo-spatial techniques based, result was validated using field data collected from the study area. It is concluded that using geospatial tool, identification and mapping for groundwater potential zones become comparatively easy task with saving lot of time and cost and with greater accuracy.