Zonation of Potential Groundwater and Its Spatial Correlation with Indices and Boreholes: Western Region of Blue Nile Basin, Ethiopia

Abstract

Water has a significant role in day to day life of people to fulfill their requirements.  Although, study area is a part of Blue Nile basin but it has great water scarcity because of its topographic and geological nature. It has been observed during the field visit that people are travelling long to get the water from remote areas. Productivity through groundwater is quite high as compared to surface water, but groundwater resources have not yet been properly exploited. The present study attempts to identify Groundwater Potential (GWP) zones in the Sede River Watershed of the Blue Nile Basin using an integrated remote sensing and GIS techniques employed Satty's Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The thematic layers were integrated using weighted overlay analysis method to delineate GWP map of the study area. Study highlighted the different potential sites where the water could accumulate and resist long time. Geology and lineament are the mainly control for the occurrence and movement of groundwater in the study area. Normalized Differentiate Water Index (NDWI) results showed the positive value less than 0.09 which highlights no existence of water where the community struggling a lot. Finally extracted pixels (>0.20) of NDMI and resulted groundwater potential sites has been validated by existing borehole data. Interestingly, study found very close relationships between them and out of 58 boreholes, approximately 15 were found under very good and good ground water potential zones and vicinity of extracted moisture pixels of NDMI.  

Keywords: Groundwater potential, GIS and Remote Sensing, NDWI, NDMI, Sede Watershed, Ethiopia

Cite this Article

Demeke Sewnet, Hasan Raja Naqvi, A.S. Mohammed Abdul Athick. Zonation of Potential Groundwater and Its Spatial Correlation with Indices and Boreholes: Western Region of Blue Nile Basin, Ethiopia. Journal of Remote Sensing & GIS. 2016; 7(3): 22–34p.