Rainwater harvesting in Modjo watershed, upper Awash River Basin, Ethiopia through remote sensing and fuzzy AHP

All human activities and overall development of this world centre on the essential life substance water. Water supply at many places is augmented mainly through rainwater harvesting (RWH). The study area needs lot of water for agriculture, livestock and human needs especially during the yearly dry season. Although several techniques are in vogue to detect apt RWH sites, their improvement especially for RWH in large sub-catchment regions is much desired. Therefore, RS and GIS techniques already in use are integrated with fuzzy logic to identify and classify sites suitable for RWH in Modjo watershed in central Ethiopia. As a result, potentially acceptable sites in the study area were discerned and categorized as very highly suitable, highly suitable, moderately suitable, low suitable, very low suitable and constraints with 18.1%, 20.9%, 20.3%, 10.6%, 3.1% and 26.9% area, respectively. Thus, the model with geospatial and analytic hierarchy process combination has proved very successful in detecting RWH sites