Application of remote sensing and GIS analysis in groundwater potential estimation in west Liaoning Province, China

Groundwater is one of the most important natural resources for mankind, it is necessary to launch a long-term monitoring of it, for the water resources protection. Remote sensing (RS) and geographic information systems (GIS) have become efficient tools in ground investigation, and shown great potential for groundwater surveying. As there is a close connection between groundwater and the surface above, this paper selected lithology, lineament density, recharge and slope as factors affecting groundwater formation, and thermal inertia and vegetation canopy as indicators of the groundwater occurrence. The groundwater-related information was obtained from conventional maps and remotely sensed data using RS and GIS techniques. A model based on analytic hierarchy process (AHP) techniques was built to understand the connection between the information and the groundwater potentiality, and was used to map the groundwater potentiality of the study area. The estimated potentiality index was compared with field-measured well yield data, and the results suggested that the potentiality index and the field measured data were exponentially related, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.8034, indicating that this method is capable of groundwater potentiality estimation.