Integration of GIS, remote sensing and AHP technique for delineation of groundwater potential zones in Mahoba district Uttar Pradesh, India

An essential component of life and the ecology is groundwater. This Precious resource is under extreme strain in India due to man-made and natural caused factors. Determining groundwater potential zones (GWPZs) is becoming a more crucial undertaking due to the world’s increasing demand for freshwater. In the current study, the groundwater potential zones of the Mahoba district are identified using geospatial and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique. Mahoba district falls in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India which is a very water scare region. The influencing factors that affects the potentiality of the research region i.e. lithology (LI), geomorphology (GM), rainfall, slope, land use and land cover (LULC), lineament density and drainage density taken under the consideration to evaluate the groundwater potential zones. The GIS software was used to create these influencing factors with the satellite images, which is acquired from many websites and organizations. The GWPZs maps were created by superimposing all of the thematic layers on top of one another after the appropriate weights were assigned using AHP technique. The delineated Groundwater potential zones (GWPZs) were divided into several categories, including very high, high, moderate, low, and very low GWPZs. The moderate form of GWPZ occupies the highest area within the research region. Well discharge data was used to validate the obtained GWPZs. The validation shows the 80% accuracy of the model. The proposed research gives the first insights of groundwater exploration.