REMOTE SENSING AND GIS BASED ASSESSMENT OF GROUNDWATER POTENTIAL ZONES IN AMU CAMPUS USING AHP APPROACHS. Said and M. AneesAbstract Groundwater has been a significant resource of water in many tropical countries. However, over exploitation of groundwater have raised concerns within techno-scientific community to devise sustainable development and management strategies for augmentation of the precious resource. Integration of remote sensing and GIS techniques has proved to be efficient and cost effective tool towards identification of ground water potential zones. Present study demonstrates the capability of GIS and remote sensing towards identification of ground water potential zones in AMU campus by utilizing GeoEye-2 imagery along with six thematic maps prepared in GIS framework namely, Land use land cover (LULC), rainfall, drainage density, DEM, slope and groundwater elevation. The influence of each thematic layer was evaluated on the basis of their relative significance towards groundwater recharge and the suitable weight values were assigned by employing the multi criteria decision making technique based on the Saatyâs analytical hierarchical process (AHP). The groundwater potential zones were classified into five categories, i.e. excellent, very good, good, moderate, and poor. Groundwater potential zonation map revealed that, of the total study area covering 2.26 km2, excellent zone comprised over 0.22 km2 (9.52% of the total study area extent), whereas very good, good, moderate, and poor zones covered 0.45 km2 (19.83%), 0.58 km2 (25.58%), 0.60 km2 (26.55%) and 0.42 km2 (18.56%) respectively. Overall, the study focusses on the demarcation and assessment of groundwater potential zones so as to enable holistic insight into strategic planning, utilization, administration and management of groundwater resources within the study area. |