THE GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMASDECISION SUPPORT TOOL IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT OF GROUNDWATER

Abstract

Nowadays, Egypt is facing many environmental problems especially in large cities like Cairo, Giza... etc due to the continuous increase in population and related developmental activities, which would result in the increase in water demand and wastewater. The main source of water in Egypt is the Nile, which originates outside the country and is shared by eleven riparian countries. Rainfall is very limited with respect to its geographical and temporal distribution and rates. The other source of fresh water is the groundwater that represents about 20 % of the available fresh water resources of the country. However, if no actions are taken to protect groundwater from degradation, the resource can loose its comparative advantage or even totally lost. This calls for a decision-making system to study the environmental management of groundwater.

The ultimate objective of the present research can be stated as follows. It is required to develop and test procedures for automatically solving the groundwater management problems through the design of appropriate software package and simplified reliable processing methodologies. In this context the aim of this thesis is to develop a GIS computerized control system to be utilized as a decision support tool in the environmental management of groundwater.

One practical application for testing the reliability of using the developed software package in a harmonic series of operations for groundwater environmental management. In this work, the selected study, or test region, is Greater Cairo. Finally, the appropriate summary, conclusions, and recommendations are extracted and presented.