Assessment of rainwater harvesting sites in a part of North-West Delhi, India using geomatic tools
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Assessment of rainwater harvesting sites in a part of North‑West Delhi, India using geomatic tools Sandhya Farswan1 · Chandrashekhar Azad Vishwakarma1 · Usha Mina1 · Vijay Kumar1 · Saumitra Mukherjee1 Received: 14 September 2018 / Accepted: 12 May 2019 / Published online: 23 May 2019 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract The study was conducted with an aim to provide practical solution for the groundwater management in three villages namely Singhola, Ghoga and Dhirpur of the North-West Delhi, India. LANDSAT remote-sensing datasets for the last four decades (1977–2018) were assessed to determine changes in vegetation cover at the selected sites. The Google Earth Engine was used to determine how values of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) were found to have varied spatially and over time for the selected sites. Strong correlations were found between the NDVI values of surface features including waterbodies, forest land, agricultural land and urban areas in Singhola, Ghoga and Dhirpur, respectively. The relative infiltration capacity of soils was highest (92.9%) and lowest (57%) for Singhola and Dhirpur, respectively, due to spatial differences in soil texture. In each village, locations exhibiting a higher soil infiltration capacity could be used for implementing managed aquifer recharge schemes using rainwater harvested from rooftops in the villages. This assessment indicated that the village of Ghoga has the highest potential (3,76,98,013.08 m3) for aquifer recharge through rooftop rainwater harvesting as compared to the other two villages. Keywords NDVI · Soil texture · Rooftop capacity · Rainwater harvesting
Introduction Densely populated areas in many parts of the world that have seasonal rainfall are facing high water scarcity problems, particularly in regions that have a semi-arid climate (Falkenmark et al. 1989). These problems can often be alleviated in regions that are underlain by suitable aquifers by harvesting rainfall and surface runoff and infiltrating the water to ground to store water in aquifers for extractive uses during the dry season. The amount of water that can be harvested in rainy seasons by these techniques depends both on the annual rainfall of the region and the intensity of individual rainfall events (Helmreich and Horn 2009; Abdulla and AlShareef 2009). Under suitable conditions, well-managed rainwater harvesting schemes can prevent the water scarcity during dry seasons and support day-to-day essential activities (Kumar and Chander 2018).
* Saumitra Mukherjee [email protected] 1
School of Environmental Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 110067, India
The use of engineering measures to harvest rainfall and enhance groundwater recharge is most effective in areas underlain by coarse textured soils, although other factors including macro-structures within the soil profile and vegetation cover can also play a significant role in controlling recharge rates (Horton 1940). The presence or absence
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