Components of urban ground water recharge in Bengaluru, India

This study investigates the various components of groundwater recharge in an urban hard-rock aquifer system of Bengaluru, India. Groundwater meets more than fifty percent of the water demand in the city. This has led to an endangered situation of groundwater. Urbanization changes the source and path of groundwater recharge. Understanding the components of groundwater recharge is the foremost important step in groundwater management in an urban environment. Rotated empirical orthogonal function (REOF) analysis of ground water level data was used to identify the significant components of ground water level variation in the study area. Rainfall and pipeline leakage were identified as the major components of groundwater recharge in the study area. The stochastic interpolation method of ordinary kriging was used to regionalise the identified significant empirical orthogonal functions.