Delineation of groundwater potential zones using geospatial and MCDM approaches in urban areas of Anantapur District, AP, India

One of the most important practises for the long-term management of groundwater resources is the delineation of groundwater potential zones. Prospecting for groundwater with sufficient precision is a challenging task. The use of a Geographic Information System (GIS) in conjunction with Multi-Criterion Decision Making Approach (MCDM) of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodologies to delineate the nonlinear behaviour of groundwater occurrence has shown to be extremely dependable. The weighted overlay analysis, which is based on remote sensing technology, is one of the many essential tools used for ground water potential zonation and has been extensively utilized in numerous research studies. Ten thematic layers like Land use land cover (LULC), Soils, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Geology, Geomorphology, Normalized Built-up Index (NDBI), Land Surface Temperature (LST), Slope, Lineament Density (LD), Drainage Density (DD) are castoff to produce Groundwater Potential Zones (GWPZs) map for the semi-arid regions in and around the Anantapur urban city, AP, India. The final groundwater potential zone map is delineated into five categories, namely ‘very high’, ‘high’, ‘good’, ‘poor’, and, ‘very poor’. The results reveal that the huge portion of the research area, 62.08%, has “Poor” and “Very poor” groundwater potential, suggesting that the region's groundwater resource is restricted and deteriorating in comparison to previous studies. The “good” zone occupies 25.23%, the “high” zone occupies 9.97%, and the “very high” zone occupies 2.27% in the total study añrea.