Authors:
Rami Al-Ruzouq
1
;
Abdallah Shanableh
1
;
Abdullah Gokhan Yilmaz
2
;
Sunanda Mukherjee
1
and
Mohamad Ali Khalil
1
Affiliations:
1
Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, University of Sharjah, Sharjah 27272, U.A.E.
;
2
Department of Engineering, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Keyword(s):
Artificial Groundwater Recharge, Geographic Information System, Remote Sensing, United Arab Emirates, Analytical Hierarchical Process.
Abstract:
United Arab Emirates (UAE) ranks among the list of most water-stressed countries. Various sustainable water policies are suggested and adopted to tackle water scarcity issues. One of them is the implication of Artificial Groundwater Recharge (AGR) sites. AGR is a novel approach to collect freshwater in the aquifers and meet the water demands at lean periods for semi-arid countries like UAE. This research scrutinizes the primary thematic layers required for AGR zonation in the Central Northern Emirates and parts of Oman integrating with Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS). Several factors, which involve hydrological, geological, water quality measured in terms of total dissolved solids (TDS), groundwater level, euclidean distance from residential areas, were weighted using Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP), and the weighted overlay was applied to derive the potential AGR map. The AGR map depicts the three best locations within the study area. Geology and ge
omorphology were the most influential factors affecting the AGR.
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