Abstract

Geospatial techniques and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) play a crucial role in the planning and management of land and water resources. GIS-based MCDA technique ‘Catastrophe theory’ has been recently proposed for evaluating groundwater potential. However, the major limitation of ‘Catastrophe theory’ is that only quantitative factors/thematic layers can be used for assessing groundwater potential, though qualitative factors are equally important. To overcome this inherent limitation, a novel GIS-based MCDA approach named ‘Hybrid Catastrophe’ technique is proposed in this study. The ‘Hybrid Catastrophe’ technique integrates the original ‘Catastrophe theory’ with the ‘Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)’ to take into account both qualitative and quantitative thematic layers for assessing groundwater potential, thereby improving the reliability and versatility of the original Catastrophe technique. The applicability of ‘Hybrid Catastrophe’ technique is demonstrated through a case study wherein 8 influential thematic layers (both quantitative and qualitative) were considered for assessing groundwater potential. The four quantitative layers were assigned weights based on the ‘Catastrophe theory’ and the remaining four qualitative layers were assigned weights based on the ‘AHP theory’. These thematic layers were integrated in GIS to delineate groundwater potential zones. The ‘Hybrid Catastrophe’ technique yields four groundwater potential zones in the study area: (i) ‘very good’ (covering 16% of the study area), (ii) ‘good’ (54%), (iii) ‘moderate’ (29%) and (iv) ‘poor’ (1%) and its accuracy was found to be 77% that is reasonably high. The proposed ‘Hybrid Catastrophe’ technique is versatile and it can be successfully applied to other parts of the world for evaluating groundwater potential at diverse spatial scales irrespective of agro-climatic, hydrologic and hydrogeologic conditions.

摘要

地理空间技术和多标准决策分析 (MCDA) 在土地和水资源的规划和管理中发挥着至关重要的作用。最近提出了基于 GIS 的 MCDA 技术“突变理论”来评估地下水潜力。然而，“巨灾理论”的主要限制是只能使用定量因素/主题层来评估地下水潜力，尽管定性因素同样重要。为了克服这一固有限制，本研究提出了一种基于 GIS 的新型 MCDA 方法，称为“混合灾难”技术。“混合灾难”技术将原始的“灾难理论”与“层次分析过程 (AHP)”相结合，以考虑评估地下水潜力的定性和定量主题层，从而提高了原始 Catastrophe 技术的可靠性和多功能性。通过一个案例研究证明了“混合灾难”技术的适用性，其中考虑了 8 个有影响的主题层（定量和定性）来评估地下水潜力。四个定量层根据“突变理论”分配权重，其余四个定性层根据“AHP 理论”分配权重。这些专题层被集成到 GIS 中以描绘地下水潜力区。“混合灾难”技术在研究区域产生了四个地下水潜力区：（i）“非常好”（覆盖研究区域的 16%），（ii）“好”（54%），（iii）“中等” （29%）和（iv）“差”（1%），其准确度为 77%，相当高。