Ecology, Environment and Conservation Paper

ASSESSMENT OF GROUNDWATER POTENTIAL ZONES USING GIS TECHNIQUE AND REMOTE SENSING IN AGNIYAR RIVER BASIN, TAMIL NADU

A. Krishnaveni and G. Elangovan

Abstract

The present study is aimed at establishing information on the groundwater potential zone in Agniyar river basin, Tamil Nadu, The total geographical area of Agniyar basin is 4663.04 sq.km. (It falls in the Survey of India degree sheets 58‘J’, 58 ‘N’ and 58’O’’ on 1:250,000 scale). The thematic maps such as geology, geomorphology, soil hydrological group, land use / land cover and drainage map were prepared for the study area using Landsat 8 images. The Digital Elevation Model (DEM) has been generated from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data with 30m resolution and contour lines from toposheets and obtained the slope (%) of the study area. Moreover, the groundwater information are potential zones of the study areas which are developed by overlaying all the thematic maps in terms of weighted overlay methods using the spatial analysis tool in Arc GIS 9.2. Ranking has been given for each individual parameter of each thematic map and weights were assigned according to the influence over such as soil -12%, geomorphology - 35%, land use/land cover - 8%, slope - 2%, lineament - 8% and drainage - 15% and the resulting maps presents the groundwater potential zones in terms of Good (602.47 sq.km.), Moderate (3998.61 sq.km.) and Poor zones (44.246 sq.km.) respectively. The result depicts the groundwater potential zones in the study area and found to be helpful in better planning and management of groundwater resources.