A fuzzy geospatial approach for delineation of groundwater potential zones in Raipur district, India

Abstract Delineation of groundwater potential zones was carried out using fuzzy geospatial approach for the sustainable groundwater resource management in Raipur district, Chhattisgarh, India. In the present study, eleven groundwater controlling factors were selected and their respective fuzzy membership (FM) layers were overlaid with fuzzy GAMMA operator to develop the groundwater potential zone (GPZ) map. A total of 62.62% and 37.38% of the total area fell under low to moderate and high GPZ category, respectively. Sensitivity analysis highlighted that lineament density (SD=0.0057), proximity to surface water body (SD=0.0046), and aquifer (SD=0.0036) were the significant contributors towards the groundwater potentiality of the region. Ground truth verification of the proposed model was done with available well yield data of the study area and a linear relation between computed GPZ indices and well yield values was found with a significant positive correlation value of 0.77 (r) that justified the model reliability and authenticity. The proposed model is a robust tool and can be utilized with versatile scale dataset in any parts of the world.