Groundwater Management In Shopian District Jammu and Kashmir With Special References To Groundwater Modelling And Quality Assessment Using Geo Spatial Tools

Abstract

Water is life and life without water is impracticable. Groundwater is one of the valuable natural resource on earth and is a primary source of life that sustains all human activities. In the present study the modern technologies like Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) technology is used in order to create a groundwater potential map which would help to depict the likelihood of existence of groundwater in the study area. The entire study area is categorised into four classes based on groundwater potential which ranges from very poor to very good. The extraction of this resultant map is based on the study of input data such as rainfall, lineament density, slope, drainage density, geomorphology, Land use/ Land cover, soil and geology. In this research weights are assigned to all these factors according to their relevance to groundwater potential opting Analytical Hierarchy process (AHP) and eventually overlay analysis resulted in the generation of the resultant map. Furthermore, a groundwater quality is illustrated by water quality index for drinking purpose and groundwater depth fluctuations was measured during various seasons in order to correlate it with the rainfall parameter in the study area. The principal pollutants of groundwater were identified using Nemerow s Pollution Index (NPI) tool. In addition to that artificial recharge sites were also identified and based on Boolean Logic Principle suitable artificial recharge structures were recommended for various sites in the study area. Finally, groundwater management plan was formulated based on various parameters for the study area. newline