TITLE:
Assessment of Groundwater Potential and Prediction of the Potential Trend up to 2042 Using GIS-Based Model and Remote Sensing Techniques for Kiambu County
AUTHORS:
Mark Boitt, Patricia Khayasi, Catherine Wambua
KEYWORDS:
Groundwater, DRASTIC, MOLUSCE, Remote Sensing, ANN, LR
JOURNAL NAME:
International Journal of Geosciences,
Vol.14 No.10,
October
31,
2023
ABSTRACT: Groundwater is one of the important necessary renewable resources of the
world. It forms part of the natural water cycle that is present in the
underground strata with the principal sources being precipitation and
streamflow. Traditionally, information on the potential occurrence of
groundwater was obtained using techniques
such as drilling, geophysical, geological, hydro-geological
and geo-electrical which are time-consuming, costly and lacked full coverage.
This study shows that remote sensing and GIS techniques can be utilized to map
groundwater potential using a GIS-based model, the Modified DRASTIC Model,
which incorporates factors that influence groundwater occurrence. These factors
are the surface attributes that infer groundwater potentials and they include
geology, soil texture, land use, lithology, landforms, slope steepness, lineaments and drainage systems. A
prediction of the groundwater prediction was done by utilizing the
MOLUSCE tool, a plugin in Qgis that utilizes ANN, multicriteria evaluation,
weights of evidence and LRs algorithms in predicting land changes. The kappa
value for prediction was 0.83. The results showed areas in the Southwest region
had low to very low potential and the central region had high to very high
potential for all the years and there were little changes between the years.
The prediction showed that by 2042, the eastern region of Kiambu County will
have a decline in groundwater potential.