GIS BASED PLANNING FOR GROUND WATER HARVESTING

Abstract

Groundwater constitutes nearly one third of world's fresh water. Groundwater is a precious resource of limited extent. In order to ensure a judicious use of groundwater, proper evaluation is required. A groundwater development program needs a large volume of multidisciplinary data from various sources. Integrated remote sensing and GIS can provide the appropriate platform for convergent analysis of diverse data sets for decision making in groundwater management and planning. The use of remote sensing technology involves large amount of spatial data management and requires an efficient system to handle such data. GIS provides suitable alternatives for efficient management of large and complex databases. Groundwater harvesting is employed to cover traditional as well as unconventional ways of ground water extraction .Underground dams and special types of wells are few examples of the groundwater harvesting techniques. Groundwater dams like 'Subsurface Dams' and 'Sand Storage Dams' are other fine examples of groundwater harvesting. They obstruct the flow of ephemeral streams in a river bed; the water is stored in the sediment below ground surface and can be used for aquifer recharge. An integrated study covering the aspect of groundwater recharge is a crucial requirement of the present day. The study will focus on development of remote sensing and GIS based analysis and methodology in groundwater recharge studies.