Professional Documents
Culture Documents
August 2009
General
Groundwater is basically a renewable resource, but the volume of water
actually in storage may vary greatly from place to place depending on
climate, regional hydrogeology and rate of groundwater used for agriculture,
industries and domestic purposes. From a practical stand point groundwater
may not be renewable in terms of a human activities like contamination,
extensive usage of groundwater and elimination of recharge areas.
The Ethiopian water resource is still not well studied and even the areas
which are potentially known did not come into practice. These may be due
to economic problems since water resource development requires large
amount of money and well qualified professionals. Out of 70 million people
living in the country only 34% get clean water which is mostly from surface
water bodies (ministry water resource) but in areas where surface water
resource is scarce or is in a limited amount, groundwater resources can be
used as the best alternative. But, before going to the development stage the
subsurface water potential has to be studied in order to get good information
and to avoid over exploitation of the resource. Identifying recharge and
discharge zones give us basic ideas where there is high potential for
groundwater in order to locate sites for boreholes, wells and for identifying
artificial recharge zones. Despite the fact that the country has been going
through series of drought periods and the population increment is at
alarming rate, still we didn’t give sufficient attention to the resource at hand
which is mainly the result of lack of skilled professionals and budget
constraint.
This study deals with identifying recharge and discharge zones using GIS
and Remote sensing technique focusing on the Tigray region which have
been affected by series of drought seasons. Specifically this study concerns
about an area located about 34km east of Mekelle town covering an area of
142.814 Km2. The area has got a very limited surface water resource and
most of the streams are ephemeral (seasonal).
Identifying the recharge and discharge zones in the area helps to determine
the groundwater potential of the area in order to locate sites for wells,
boreholes and for selection of artificial recharge zones for irrigation purpose.
Objective
The core objective of this study is to identify and map the recharge and
discharge zones using the primary and secondary data on the geology and
hydrology and hydrogeology of the area.
- To prepare a detailed geological, land use, soil, Water level map and
hydrogeological maps of the study area.
-To determine the hydraulic gradient and water level of the catchment
-To characterize the rock units in the area with respect to their groundwater
holding and transmitting capacity.
This thesis is planned based on the fact that the people living in the upper
Illala basin are highly affected by clean water shortage which is the result of
lack of pre drilling investigation which resulted many unsuccessful borehole
drillings and wastage of the country’s budget. So, Identifying recharge and
discharge zones using GIS and Remote sensing give us basic ideas where
there is high potential for groundwater in order to locate sites for boreholes,
wells and for identifying artificial recharge zones.
The methods planned to be used in this study include literature review, field
investigation and data analysis using different soft wares.
• Topography maps, aerial photographs satellite Images of available
scales are interpreted in the office and checked in the field.
• Available analog data are digitized and analyzed using GIS software.
The geological and hydrogeological data collected from the field are
used for the preparation of the hydrogeological map.
• The drainage map is planned to be prepared from the topo sheet and
satellite data of the study area.
• The map classes will be assigned different scores, and the maps
themselves receive different weights.
• The scores and weights assignment is based on facts that consider
the importance of the different parameters in controlling
groundwater occurrence and movement in the particular area under
consideration (knowledge-based approach). The weighted index
overlay method which will be used to produce our final composite
map has incorporated the Geology, Structural density, Topography,
Land Use, Slope and Soil distribution as the core parameters for the
outcome. These individual parameters will given weight values
according to their importance (degree of influence) in the recharging
process of the particular area.
• Those parameters which have the highest influence or importance
are given highest and those with least control were assigned small
values
• The average score will then be defined by:
n
∑S W ij i
S= i
n
∑W i
i
Where
► S is the weighted score for the area (polygon, pixel),
► Wi is weight for the i-th input map, and
► S ij is the score for the j-th class of the i-th map, the value of j
In Ethiopia, water resource is still not well studied and even the areas with
high Groundwater potential are not sufficiently utilized (or even not come to
practice at all).
GIS is very crucial for groundwater studies. In groundwater studies one has
to deal with information comprising of locational data and attribute data, this
could be done easily by the GIS technology
Our study which will deal with identification of recharge and discharge
zones using GIS and remote sensing will have a great role in precisely
locating locate groundwater potential zones which leads to location of bore
holes sites.
And specifically the local people in many villages of the study area are
suffering from lack of water and they have to make a long and tiresome
journey to fetch the water for their daily domestic consumptions. So, this
and other similar researches will contribute allot to the scientific selection
borehole sites which increase the number of effective wells in the area and
distributing them evenly to the local people
Time table
1 Desk work Collection of
references works
done in the area
Collection of datas
,Maps papers done in
the area
Producing
preliminary maps
from satellite images
and aerial
photographs
2 Preliminary field Reconnaissance field
visit survey the study area
in order has visual
understanding of the
study area.
3 Preparation for Based of the
the main filed information from
work field visit.
4 Main field work Where primary datas
are collected
5 Paper work and Producing maps,
Maps graphs and tables
using the collected
datas.
Writing the body
parts of the thesis.
6 Thesis submission First draft
Second draft
Final
References