Assessing the impact of urbanization on ground water storage in Kampala district

Abstract

Urbanization is affecting groundwater storage in developing countries and Uganda is not exceptional. This study has investigated the impact of urbanization on groundwater storage between 2002 and 2022. Landsat images from Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thematic Mapper (TM) were downloaded for the years 2002, 2012 and 2022. The study area was classified using Maximum Likelihood Supervised Classification to create one class of urbanization. The groundwater storage of the study area was obtained from Global Land Data Assimilation Systems (GLDAS) model using NASA’s Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Centre. Secondary data as well as a questionnaire were used to find out the relationship between groundwater and urbanization. Results of Maximum likelihood classification showed that urbanization is increasing and there is increase in groundwater storage in Kampala district. The relationship between urbanization and groundwater storage was not clearly shown by the study despite the fact that groundwater storage is increasing with urbanization thus need for further research.