Identifying Prospective Areas for Groundwater Potential Zone in Allahabad City

Groundwater is an important resource contributing significantly in total annual supply. However, overexploitation has depleted groundwater availability considerably. Assessing the potential zone of groundwater recharge is extremely important for the protection of water quality and the management of groundwater systems. Integration of Remote Sensing data and the Geographical Information System (GIS) for the exploration of groundwater resources has become a breakthrough in the field of groundwater research, which can assists in assessing, monitoring, and conserving groundwater resources. The accurate information to obtain the parameters that can be considered for identifying the groundwater potential zone are found to be geomorphology, slope, Landuse/landcover and lithology. In this study weighted overlay method is utilized in ArcGIS environment. Suitable ranks are assigned for each category of these parameters. This procedure is repeated for all the other layers and resultant layers are reclassified. About 43.44 km2 of the total area falls under the ‘very poor’ zone, 21.56 km2 falls under ‘poor’ zone, 18.89 km2 falls under moderate zone and 12.61 km2 is come under ‘very good’ groundwater potential zone. The excellent groundwater potential zone is concentrated in the north-eastern and north-east region of the study area due to the distribution of alluvial plains and agricultural land with high infiltration ability. This groundwater potential information will be useful for effective identification of suitable locations for extraction of water. The study was found to be useful in conserving natural resources which are depleting at high rates due to the pressure and demand of increasing population.