Application of decision support system/remote sensing/GIS techniques in groundwater recharge assessment

Abstract

ABSTRACT Managing water resources and storing water through the identification of groundwater recharge zones (GWRZs) are critical to water security in Egypt. Decision-support systems (DSSs), remote sensing, and GIS techniques have yielded significant data for water resources modeling. The geologic, geomorphic, climatic, and hydrologic features of the Toshka area, Western Lake Nasser, Egypt, have been generated by data from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, Climatic Research Unit gridded Time Series, Sentinel 2 time series, and Landsat-8 OLI. Fifteen GIS thematic maps have been ranked and normalized using five DSS techniques: Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy process (FAHP), Frequency Ratio (FR), Shannon Entropy (SE), and Multi-Influencing Factor (MIF). To ensure the computational usefulness of these models, GWRZs have been extracted and compared. The outcomes showed that 83, 87.5, 99.1, 99.1, and 87.5% of the existing wells are in high to extreme GWRZs for AHP, FAHP, FR, SE, and MIF, respectively. The receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) was used to assess the effectiveness of these models. It was found that the SE model had the highest predictive performance rates, as its ROC accuracy value was 91.1%, while the FR, AHP, FAHP, and MIF approaches had values of 91, 84.4, 81.9, and 89.9%, respectively.