Assessment of groundwater potential over the Haryana region: GIS-AHP v/s field data

Abstract This study aims to delineate groundwater potential (GWP) zones of the Haryana state, India, using geospatial techniques for the year 2023. In this, multiple thematic layers created and integrated through geographic information system (GIS) and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). The data utilized in this research were collected from multiple sources, including the shuttle radar topography mission (SRTM), Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, the food and agriculture organisation (FAO), and the India meteorological department (IMD). Thematic layers including slope, land use/land cover (LULC), soil, geology, drainage density, and lineament density, were created and weighted through the AHP. The layers were subsequently integrated through the weighted overlay analysis (WOA) method to create a GWP map for the area. This GWP map of the year 2023 was compared utilizing groundwater level (GWL) data of the year 2018 from the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), resulting in a similarity rate of 77.55%. The results indicate that the moderate GWP zone covers 3.71% of the study area, followed by the high GWP zone, which covers 33.24% of the study area. Very high GWP covers only 11.96% of the region. The low and very low GWP zones encompass 7.59% and 3.51%, respectively. The results show that most of the territory has moderate to high GWP, with minor areas having low or extremely low potential. This shows the efficacy of GIS-AHP methods in identifying GWP zones and serves as a crucial instrument for the management of water resources in arid regions such as Haryana.