A mobile App for integrated borehole siting in semi-arid areas: case study Rukiga District, Kamwezi Sub Region

Abstract

Even though geoelectrical techniques such as direct current resistivity measurements have been used successfully as one of the important techniques for investigations of groundwater, their effectiveness in identification of potential sites for drilling in semi-arid area is often improved by integrating other borehole siting techniques such as remote sensing and geological investigations. However, its applications do not allow geological triangulation of siting techniques in mobile APP. it’s for this reason that a comparison could be made between traditional water point surveys and geophysical investigations (integration of different methods). Therefore, this project intends to integrate borehole siting techniques to select optimized site for high yielding borehole. The project aimed to develop a mobile application that integrates borehole siting techniques to enhance siting processes through geological triangulation. The techniques include; remote sensing, geophysical and hydrogeological. The study used a qualitative research methodology such as; interviews and document analysis for requirement gathering and the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) for the development of the application was followed through the guidance of the waterfall model. The study followed a rigorous research process which included reviewing and analysing the current systems. Data collected from the field was analysed. An interview guide was used to collect useful information to help in understanding the data flow. This was achieved through the development of a Mobile App for integrated borehole siting techniques with the use of java script, PHP and MySQL. The implementation was successful and improved the user’s operational efficiency in providing scoring points that help to determine the most suitable water points and will act as a guide to ease the work of hydrogeologists when determining suitable Vertical Electrical Sounding curves (VES) of a given area, by focusing on lineaments target sites through carrying out geophysical profiling perpendicular to major marked lineament during aerial photograph. In conclusion this Mobile App developed will help hydrogeologists become more efficient, and improve on integrating different techniques in order to reduce uncertainty that were associated with ground water exploration.