Geomatics based assessment on land use changes and its impact over the groundwater conditions in a newly developing sub urban area - a case of Southern Chennai.

Geomatics is today widely used in land use change detection and management of water resources. The technology has found to be very effective in identification of land use changes occurred over a period of time with temporal data. Explosive growth of urbanisation, increasing demand of water for industries and IT parks have resulted in reduction of water bodies and land use in southern sub urban area of Chennai City. Detection of land use changes brings out aquifer hazards in the study area. The present paper summarizes the aggravating groundwater problem and gives solution through geomatics by integrating drainage, geology, geomorphology, lineament, soil, water level, rainfall and land use for the periods 1994, 2004 and 2008. By synthesizing the satellite data and hydrogeological information, changes in land use category, uprising aquifer hazards, unaccountable groundwater extraction surpassing over unplanned growth of urbanization which have trigged the hydrogeological imbalance, lowering of water level have been identified.