Delineation of groundwater potential zone: Remote sensing and gis approach in doon valley, Dehradun, Uttarakhand

Integration of various themes with remote sensing and GIS based weighted overlay technique is becoming common and cost effective approach to delineate groundwater potential zones in groundwater studies. To understand the groundwater potential of study region, various raster themes such as geomorphology, lithology, lineament density, drainage density, Land use & Landcover, soil map, topographic position index (TPI) and slope has been prepared. The thematic content has been produced from different sources viz. Survey of India (SOI) toposheets (1:50,000), Advanced Space born Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) Global Digital Elevation model, Linear Imaging self-Scanning Sensor (LISS)-III and LANDSAT 8 imageries and processed in software's Arc Map and ERDAS Imagine. Ranking and weightages has been assigned to each class of thematic raster and thematic map was produced. Based on the obtained output entire study area has been categorized into five groundwater potential zones namely as good, moderate, poor, very poor, and extremely Poor which covers 29.92, 41.24, 11.04, 12.46 and 5.34 percent of total area respectively. The result was validated with field data, which overlaid over groundwater potential map and shows its availability. The result depicts that study area has a considerable groundwater potential and high groundwater recharging capacity.