Identifying Groundwater Potential Regions in Sokoto Basin, Northwestern Nigeria: An Integrated Remote Sensing, GIS, and MIF Techniques

Sokoto basin is known to experience an acute shortage of surface and groundwater resources due to climate change, increasing aridity, and land degradation among several other concerns. Being in an agrarian environment, the people are faced with the hardship of a limited supply of water, especially for dry season crop cultivation. Therefore, this study aims to identify and delineate good groundwater potential zones to guide its exploitation. The study utilized nine GWPR factors, including geology, soil property, geomorphology, slope, lineament density, drainage density, rainfall, land use/land cover, and groundwater level fluctuation. These factors were sourced from remotely sensed data and reliable archived hydrological data, after which thematic layers were prepared and assembled in the ArcGIS 10.5 environment. The Multi-Influence Factor (MIF) analysis techniques and the weighted overlay method were used to assign weights and the groundwater potential map of the study area was generated. The results classified the basin into, poor, moderate, good, and very good groundwater potential regions, with the spatial expanse of 17.4 km2 (0.028%), 34,470.6 km2 (54.8%), 26,380.2 km2 (42.0%), and 2020.5 km2 (3.2%), respectively. The good to very good potential regions are mostly domiciled in the southern part of the basin covering most parts of Kebbi State. In contrast, the moderate to the poor regions are restricted to the northern part of the basin essentially covering most parts of Sokoto and Zamfara States. Validation shows that the results are in tandem with the outcome of the GIS and MIF techniques.