Summary

Groundwater is one of the most important components of our life support system and has a
significant contribution to economic development. In recent decades, the utilization of
groundwater has remarkably increased. one of the major concerns is groundwater
contamination by industrial wastewater. Consecutive monitoring/ mapping of aquifer water
quality is an expensive and hectic job in relatively large areas. Therefore, groundwater
vulnerability maps are becoming more crucial to identify regional aquifer contamination
potential. The present study area is focused to the largest industrial and metropolitan city of
Pakistan, i.e. Faisalabad. The district Faisalabad possesses an area of 5856 km2 which is
geographically situated in 30.68°N 72.85°E to 31.76°N 73.21°E as shown in Fig. 1a. The
study area possesses an arid climate where the summer season is extremely hot. Ambient
temperature in summer is usually ranging from 20 to 50 °C whereas it is 7 to 27 °C in case of
mild cold winter season. In addition, there is a wide range of variations in monthly average
rainfall and the average annual precipitation study area which was recorded as 440 mm. The
highest rainfall usually occurs during the monsoon period from July to September and
accounts for about 60% of the average annual rainfall. The study is aimed to explore
groundwater vulnerability potential zones and to identify most in fluencing hydrogeological
characteristics. In this regard, a GIS-based DRASTIC model is used to delineate vulnerability
to agricultural applications. Input softhe model are based on seven different layer sand the
model is compared with groundwater samples. Results showed that the model accurately
identifies the vulnerability with the prediction efficiency of ~73%. The results revealed that
more than 30% of the study area has high vulnerability potential, located in the middle and
upper part of district Faisalabad.

The main conclusions drawn from this study research are the GIS technique provided an
efficient way for analyses and high capabilities in handling a large quantity of spatial data,
the DRASTIC method represents aquifer accurately. It identified the vulnerability of the
study area with a prediction efficiency of nearly 73% with respect to salinity, the areas having
low, medium and high vulnerability potential were identified, high vulnerability areas are
located in the surrounding of Salarwala, Chak Jhumra and Khurianwala cities. The resulted
corresponding influencing parameters were shallow groundwater table, gradual slope, and
sandy aquifer. It has been found that the causation of high vulnerability in the surrounding of
various cities is due to shallow ground water table, high recharge, gradual slope, sandy
aquifer media, and soil media that consist of medium sand. In some of the cities, dominating
factors are shallow ground water table, gradual slope, vadose zone that consists of course
sand and high hydraulic conductivity. Therefore, it is recommended that the site-specific
solutions according to their influencing hydrogeological features to pollution must be
adopted, a proper drainage system should be prepared in highly vulnerable areas due to the
gradual slope for avoiding groundwater contamination, aquifer storage and recovery wells,
and rainwater harvesting should be adopted in areas of sandy aquifer media causing the
medium to high vulnerability to reduce water salinity and more accurate and precise data set
should be used to get outstanding results. In this aspect, rainwater harvesting, aquifer storage,
and recovery wells (ASR) could be adopted to reduce water salinity in medium and high
vulnerability areas.