The groundwater occurrence and movement within the flow systems are governed by many natural factors like topography, geology, geomorphology, lineament structures, soil, drainage network and land use land cover (LULC). Due to complex natural geological/hydro-geological regime a systematic planning is needed for groundwater exploitation. It is even more important to characterize the aquifer system and delineate groundwater potential zones in different geological terrain. The study employed integration of weighted index overlay analysis (WIOA) and geographical information system (GIS) techniques to assess the groundwater potential zones in Krishna river basin, India and the validation of the result with existing groundwater levels. Different thematic layers such as geology, geomorphology, soil, slope, LULC, drainage density, lineament density and annual rainfall distribution were integrated with WIOA using spatial analyst tools in Arc-GIS 10.1. These thematic layers were prepared using Geological survey of India maps, European Digital Archive of Soil Maps, Bhuvan (Indian-Geo platform of ISRO, NRSC) and 30 m global land cover data. Drainage, watershed delineation and slope were prepared from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission digital elevation model of 30 m resolution data. WIOA is being carried out for deriving the normalized score for the suitability classification. Weight factor is assigned for every thematic layer and their individual feature classes considering their significant importance in groundwater occurrence. The final map of the study area is categorized into five classes very good, good, moderate, poor and very poor groundwater potential zones. The result describes the groundwater potential zones at regional scale which are in good agreement with observed ground water condition at field level. Thus, the results derived can be very much useful in planning and management of groundwater resources in a regional scale.
