Abstract: As fresh water resource groundwater has greater significance in major portion of world. It is one of the major components of the entire water supply for drinking and irrigation purposes. The key issues regarding groundwater are its exploration, appraisal and management.The present work deals with the utilization of GIS based analytical hierarchy process (AHP) technique for identification of the groundwater potential recharge zones in Bengaluru urban district, Karnataka, India.Various factors that influence the occurrence, movement, yield and quality of groundwater in an area are Lithology, Geomorphology, Drainage density, Lineaments density, Soil, Elevation, Slope, Lu/Lc and Rainfall. These thematic layers were extracted from Liss III imagery, CartoDEM, topographical map, and other secondary data sources using software such as Arc GIS 10.2, Erdas Imagine 9.2 and Google Earth. Because of the different weightage of influence on various themes and their feature on the presence of groundwater recharge potential zones in an area AHP technique is introduced to allocate weightage.Weighted overlay sub module from ArcGIS environment was used to integrate these thematic layers to prepare the groundwater recharge potential zones of the study area. The zones thus obtained were divided into five categories, viz., Very good, Good, Moderate, Poor and Very poor zones based on the availability of groundwater.
Keywords: AHP, Bengaluru Urban District, GIS, Groundwater Potential recharge Zone, Remote Sensing.