The Use of GIS and Google Earth for Preliminary Site Selection of Groundwater Recharge in the Azraq Oasis Area—Jordan

Abstract

Groundwater is considered to be the major water resource for many areas and the only source of water in some areas in Jordan. Some of Jordan groundwater resources are presently exploited at maximum capacity and in some cases are exploited beyond there safe yield. One of the efficient ways to fight the deficit in groundwater resources is through recharging the water tables naturally or artificially. This research aimed to select the optimum sites for groundwater recharge in the Azraq Oasis area/Jordan through the use of GIS techniques. The selection criteria were based on slope, drainage density, lineament density within the study area. The adopted selection technique was the Boolean techniques (Multiplication) within a Raster GIS. Thirty five sites were selected within the study area with areas vary between 5.2 ha to 273.5 ha. The total area that has the potential for groundwater recharge is 1659.5 ha which represents ca. 3.55% of the study area.

The Use of GIS and Remote Sensing to Investigate Groundwater Vulnerability to Contamination and Surface Water Susceptibility to Pollution at Mafraq Dumpsite/Jordan

“…Furthermore, the SRTM DEM was employed to create the drainage system (Wadis) for the study area using flow accumulation function ArcGIS. Additionally, using Google Earth has ensured that a land use map can be generated based on the on the screen digitizing technique ( [48], [49]).…”

Application of a GIS Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for the Identification of Intrinsic Suitable Sites in Costa Rica for the Application of Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) through Spreading Methods

“…GIS-MCDA for the identification of MAR suitable sites has been applied to entire countries such as Australia [15] and Spain [16], as well as in many regions of the world, for example in India [17][18][19][20][21][22][23], Iran [24][25][26][27], Jordan [28,29], Portugal [12,30], Tunisia [31,32], and the United States [33,34]. The general process for MAR site suitability analysis proposed in [12] is: problem definition, screening of feasible areas, suitability mapping-including the classification of thematic layers or criteria, standardization, weighting of the criteria and layers overlaying-and sensitivity analysis.…”

“…In [19] a drainage density under 2 km/km 2 is considered favorable for MAR. A lower drainage network density category is used in [29] where values higher than 1 km/km 2 are unsuitable for MAR. All the classification systems discussed show linear increments in the class limits.…”

“…Several different approaches to classify the suitability of the slope are available in the literature [12,[16][17][18][19][21][22][23][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]41]. The linear function for the standardization of the slope is used in [12,41], all the others use the step-wise function (slope classes).…”

“…The drainage density indicator is standardized using a step-wise function in [17,19,21,22,29]. The classification system used in [17,21] ranges from "good" or "excellent" (0-0.75 km/km 2 ) to "poor" (>2.5 km/km 2 ), with class limit increments of 0.75.…”