IDENTIFICATION OF GROUNDWATER RECHARGE ZONES AND ARTIFICIAL RECHARGE STRUCTURES FOR PART OF TAMIL NADU, INDIA - A GEOSPATIAL APPROACH

Water is essential for the existence of all forms of life for human consumption, agriculture and industrial. This is the reason why the man has moved and settled only in areas of rich water resources. As the population has started growing and unregulated usage of surface water resources has been initiated in multiple fronts the available water is not able to cope up to human needs. So, the man has aggressively and competitively started mining the ground water reservoirs all over the world using all the possible and available modern technologies. Hence the ground water have started playing some dividend, so to replenish the extracted water from the underground reservoirs definite newer avenues are to be created, so that there exists equilibrium between the extraction and the replenishments. A large amount of rain water is lost through runoff, a problem compounded by the lack of rainwater harvesting practices (Murugiah M & Venkatraman P 2013). So, a technique of pushing the rain water into the deeper part of the aquifer system is called Artificial Recharge. The main objective of the study is to identify suitable sites for artificial recharge and also to identify the site specific mechanisms such as sites for desiltation of tanks, percolation ponds, check dams, pittings and enechelon dams etc, in the study area through Geospatial technology. To attain this Remote Sensing Technology is the good tool in mapping such geological features related to artificial recharge, due to its multispectral photo capturing capacity and repeativity coverage, where as GIS Technology got special and advanced merits, in storing archiving, manipulating, modelling and retrieving of huge amount of various spatial and non spatial data.