| Abstract |
Madurai city operates as the administrative core for the Madurai District and the cultural center of Tamil Nadu. The government of India started the smart city mission to Madurai city to make citizens a friendly and sustainable city. Water supply is a critical component of a smart city’s physical infrastructure, and it can be managed if one is aware of the available groundwater resources. Thus, the goal of this work is to determine the groundwater prospect zones in Madurai by applying the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP). Groundwater productivity depends on various hydrological and hydrogeological parameters. The different thematic layers of drainage density, curvature, land use/land cover, roughness, slope, geology, topographic wetness index, soil, lineament density, and geomorphology are used to recognize groundwater prospect zones. The criteria weights for individual features of each thematic layer were given using FAHP. The final results of potential groundwater zones were grouped into very poor, poor, moderate, good, and very good. The parameters of slope, land use/land cover, geology, drainage density, and geomorphology have greater importance in storing more groundwater than other parameters. To validate the findings, the area under the curve in receiver operator characteristics was employed. The development and management of the identified groundwater potential regions would assist Madurai’s smart city construction. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024. |
