Drought severity modeling of upper Bhima river basin, western India, using GIS-AHP tools for effective mitigation and resource management

The combination of geographic information system (GIS) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) performs the drought vulnerability assessment of larger areas efficiently. The drought intensity and types are locale specific, and hence the spatial distribution helps in formulating the strategies to combat this natural hazard. With this view, the drought-prone and vulnerable areas in upper Bhima river basin from western India were delineated considering the ten associated parameters, viz. NDVI, rainfall, slope, vadose zone, soil depth, LULC, water harvesting structures, geomorphology, drainage density and groundwater level fluctuation. AHP was employed composing the pairwise and normalized pairwise comparison matrix to obtain the relative weight of each parameter. The cumulative effect of influencing parameters was considered to generate the drought zonation map of the region in the GIS environment. The resultant map depicts that about 24% area falls under the severe drought and about 31% area in moderate drought zones. This drought severity mapping could be helpful in preparedness and providing water scarcity relief measures to the affected villages in the region.