Groundwater Exploration Zones of Mubi Local Government of Adamawa State Using Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System

Groundwater is one of the major resources contributing to the total annual supply for economic development and ecology diversity; it is of great importance in the urban and rural areas. Groundwater is a major source of water supply for human consumption and the rate at which human scout for water on a daily basis is becoming alarming coupled with exploitation process of unskilled professionals which causes degradation to our valuable lands at some places because of the problems of identifying points where groundwater can be found for exploration. The combination of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) has become a useable tool for mapping groundwater potential zone to enable water exploration point for water supply and boreholes sighting. In the study, Remote Sensing and GIS based technique is developed and tested for the evaluation of the groundwater resources in Mubi Local Government Area, the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and LandSAT TM image of the year 1999 was acquired for this research and the False Color Composite (FCC) of the images was formed by the use band 4, 3, 2 to enhance feature extraction within the area of study, it was further classified into six (6) different land use such as urban area, bareland, rock-Outcrop, thick vegetation, cropland and grassland using maximum likelihood supervised classification technique. The Digital Elevation Model (DEM) was used to generate the drainage density map; slope, aspect, flow accumulation and stream order, thus; all images that influences groundwater were then ranked and weighted for final composite map for groundwater potential zones of Mubi. The Geomorphology, slope, drainage density, Land use/land cover, geology and slope, are considered for the identification of groundwater potential. The final composite map depicting the groundwater zone of the study area is classified into five (5) groups; very poor, poor, moderate, good and excellence.