Abstract: Groundwater potential analysis is used to identify and protect groundwater resources and reduce the cost of water source exploitation. The traditional groundwater potential analysis method is mature in technology and has a simple algorithm, but it has the problems of a long mining period and low prediction accuracy. This paper proposes a spatial hierarchy overlay method (SHOM) for groundwater potential. Firstly, it uses spatial analysis methods to extract hydrogeological data, and selects multiple evaluation factors based on the mechanism of groundwater concentration. Then it uses AHP to determine the weight of each factor to replace the traditional average weighting or subjective weighting process. Finally, a geographical unit is established for spatial overlay analysis to complete groundwater potential evaluation. In this paper, Jiangyou city, Sichuan province, serves as the study area. Based on the proposed SHOM analysis method, a groundwater potential model is constructed according to 12 hydrogeological characteristics, such as elevation, slope, distance from the river, TWI, TRI, etc., and regional groundwater potential is evaluated. The results show that the areas with low, medium, and high groundwater potential in Jiangyou city account for 12.97%, 61.38%, and 25.65%, respectively, and have been verified with 72 groundwater wells.

Key words: groundwater potential analysis, analytic hierarchy process, multi-criteria decision analysis, weighted overlay analysis, semi-quantitative model