Identification of Groundwater Potential Zone in Rural Sub-watershed using RS and GIS

Groundwater is a dynamic and replenishment in natural resources, which support all environmental issues. To understand groundwater prospects of an area, integration of different thematic layers is required. An attempt was made to identify groundwater potential zones in the Muktha river (upper Manimuktha) sub-watershed (4C1A2e) of Tamilnadu, India for effective usage of groundwater resource for agricultural and non-agricultural activities and for sustainable groundwater management. Toposheet maps of SOI and IRS 1C satellite imageries are used for preparing various thematic maps viz. geology, geomorphology, slope, land use/cover, lineament density, drainage density, soil map, hydrologic soil groups and runoff. After transforming these thematic layers to raster format, assigned ranks and weightage to the factors according to their influence of groundwater recharge. Based on the groundwater availability a composite groundwater potential map has been generated as high, moderate, less and poor zones of covering 10.86%, 37.93%, 35.11% and 16.10% in the study area respectively. Agricultural oriented artificial groundwater recharging methods are recommended to develop the poor and the less groundwater potential zones.