1. Introduction
Egypt has a rapidly growing population of around 100 million people who live on less than 6% of the country’s land area [
1]. As a result, the demand for water, food, and urban development is rapidly increasing. These circumstances necessitate the development of new, favorable locations in Egypt that have not yet been developed. The Eastern Desert accounts for 20% of Egypt’s total land area. The Nile Valley is bounded east by the Gulf of Suez and west by the Red Sea. The Safaga-Bir Queh region is located in the Eastern Desert’s central region. It holds an important position because it overlooks the Red Sea, providing access to the Gulf States, East Asia, and Africa. It is a vast, dry area with scarce groundwater resources. It is an attractive new investment area in the Egyptian deserts for irrigation practice. Climate change refers to any statistically significant and persistent change in the mean state of the climate over a long period. Social migration influences the local immigrants. Climate variability can relate to changes in natural or anthropogenic external factors and natural internal processes within the climate system. The world has just passed through the frightening state of increasing temperature at a pace of 0.128 ± 0.026 °C each year for 59 years, with its negative impact on global vegetation cover [
2]. In unplanned economic activities, precipitation affects soil moisture. Moisture content differs from soil to soil and season to season, influenced by rainfall. Surface water resource management and an area’s physiographic characteristics are necessary for humans and agricultural use. Ecosystem activities and agricultural planning have been deemed a vital sector in irrigation planning by policymakers worldwide due to their importance in agriculture. Climate change’s hydrological response may considerably influence existing water resources systems by altering the hydrological cycle. As a result, hydrologic extremes such as flooding and drought have a harmful influence on all watersheds. However, planning and organizing the new water infrastructure are not developed according to the projected changes of precipitation, temperature, and stream flows for efficient water resource management.
New agricultural projects in the desert have attracted densely populated residents of the River Nile area (Qena). From 1960 to 1996, the per capita annual water availability in the Arab countries declined to 2050 m
3 [
3]. Due to the sharp increase in population, it is evident that other water consumed in the next 30 years will altogether diminish. It is crucial to detect and investigate the most promising aquifer recharge areas in response to this situation. People will agree to reside in the desert if there will be a proper arrangement of groundwater resources, infrastructures, and agriculture. The groundwater resources are not enough to irrigate the land between the Qena and Safaga-Bir Queh area; therefore, modern techniques are necessary to explore new groundwater potential zones (GWPZs). Part of the desert land is used for water-consuming crops and partly for medicinal herbs (low water consumption). There is a significant impact of anthropogenic activities on groundwater quality and quantity in urban and rural zones. Therefore, there is a need to provide alternative groundwater resources.
The actual supply of water was insufficient to meet demand. As a result, there is an urgent need to develop alternative water resources, which are the main objective of the present work. Watersheds in the Eastern Desert dissect into the Red Sea Mountains and extend into Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks, eventually draining into the Red Sea or the Nile Valley [
4]. The average precipitation ranges from 2.75 mm/y at Qena to 50 mm/y in the extreme southeastern zone, with heavy rain showers occurring on occasion during the autumn season, causing flooding. Despite the scarcity of rainfall events, many flash floods were reported in both the Eastern Desert and Sinai between 1975 and 2014 [
3,
5]
The aquifers are among the most critical water resources for growth and drinking suitability in rural and urban areas [
6]. The aquifer was always migrated and rechargeable, but unfortunately, it is rare in hard rocks (geology of the present study). Modern geophysical, geological, and hydrogeological surveys techniques are currently used to find new and promising groundwater recharge areas, but they are complex, costly, and require consultants [
7]. Hydrogeological and geological thematic maps overlap with remote sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques have been used for several past investigations [
8,
9]. GIS and RS techniques are combined to determine the aquifer’s recharge zone [
10,
11,
12]. RS and GIS tools can detect the most promising recharge areas for aquifer [
13,
14,
15,
16]. The groundwater prospection zones are based mainly on integrations of multiple criteria such as stream networks, topography, lithology, and steepness of slope and frequency of lineaments. This process is most commonly known as multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) [
17]. They represent good evidence of aquifer conditions [
18]. AHP for delineating GWPZs has been used by researchers in Kedah Peninsula, Malaysia [
19]. The authors of [
20,
21,
22,
23] used the analytical hierarchical process (AHP) techniques for the exploration of GWPZs and recharge rate. The AHP technique declines the complicated outputs to a sequence of pair-wise data and produces the results [
24]. The AHP is an excellent approach for calculating outputs consistency, decreasing bias, and applying in a different environment [
20]. The features, such as geomorphology, geology, lineaments density, slope, drainage density, and rainfall, are integrated by the GIS model with weightage determination by AHP to produce aquifer potential and recharge zones.
Due to the arid to the very arid climatic nature, the shortage of freshwater is the main problem affecting development plans in the Qena and Safaga-Bir Queh region of the eastern desert in Egypt. Groundwater is a preferred alternative solution to deal with this type of problem, but >50% of the covered geology was hard rocks; therefore, the aquifer potential delineation and distribution geospatially was very complex due to the shortage in data sets and geological changes. Therefore, this study aims to determine the distribution of shallow aquifers suitable for living, agriculture, and industrial development by evaluating aquifer influencing parameters, discovering aquifer recharge zones, and finally, creating a GWPZs map using and comparing AHP and MCE techniques based on RS and GIS. In addition, the observed total dissolved solid (TDS) in the groundwater of the study area has been used to validate the model outputs of potential aquifer zones. The study shows the significance of the AHP and MCE technique for preparing an efficient and low-cost approach for delineating GWPZs, which may also be applied in other hard rock terranes.
4. Conclusions
This research aims to expand agricultural land and population migration outside the Nile basin. Groundwater resources are limited, and precipitation infiltration into the aquifer is dependent on an open fracture system. Conduit channels are medium to low in metamorphic and igneous rocks, representing the majority of exposed rocks. GIS technique constructs and overlaps various raster layers, including morphological structures, geology, lineaments density, slope, drainage density, and rainfall. They are critical in the storage and transportation of groundwater.
The GWPZs were created using the AHP and MCE methods and classified into five potential zones: very low, low, medium, high, and very high. Very low and low aquifer potential zones are distributed randomly throughout the study area and are primarily exposed by hard rocks. Zones with high to very high potential are concentrated in an enclosed area in the central and western parts. The GWPZ areas and geospatial sites are not significantly different between the AHP and MCE methods. The GWPZs were validated using aquifer TDS concentration and groundwater flow, and both techniques showed good accuracy. It ensures that RS and GIS can identify the best areas for agriculture, development, and residential sites.
The GWPZs map provides decision-makers with the best aquifer resource planning and management to improve the irrigation industry and encourage Bedouins and Nile River residents to relocate to the deserts. Further research on the eastern desert lands parallel to the Nile will attract people from the Nile to the desert areas, thereby evenly distributing Egypt’s population. The most promising research outcomes are land use management, aquifer resource planning, usage, and high income/capita.