Assessment of groundwater potential zones using GIS and remote sensing techniques in the Bole District, Savannah Region, Ghana

Over the past few decades, groundwater has become a vital resource due to its increasing demand owing to rapid population growth and industrialization. The sustainable development and management of groundwater resources need intensive research using current innovative techniques. Therefore, in this study, an integrated approach involving GIS and remote sensing techniques was applied to thematic layers such as geology, geomorphology, drainage density, lineament density, slope, soil, and land use land cover to generate groundwater potential zone map. The thematic layers and their features were assigned weights based on their relative influence on groundwater occurrence. The weighted thematic layers were overlaid using a weighted sum in ArcMap 10.3 to create the groundwater potential zones map. The final output map shows different zones of groundwater potential ranging from very good, good, moderate, fair to poor. The very good to moderate groundwater potential zones are mainly around the southern, eastern, and western fringes of the district, whereas the fair to poor groundwater potential zones cover the northern and central fringes and some parts of the southern domain. The groundwater potential zones map was finally validated using borehole yield from data of 22 boreholes, which showed a good correlation and is found to be helpful in developing better strategies for groundwater exploitation.