Particle swarm optimization based artificial neural network model for forecasting groundwater level in Udupi district

The decline in groundwater is a global problem due to increase in population, industries, and environmental aspects such as increase in temperature, decrease in overall rainfall, loss of forests etc. In Udupi district, India, the water source fully depends on the River Swarna for drinking and agriculture purposes. Since the water storage in Bajae dam is declining day-by-day and the people of Udupi district are under immense pressure due to scarcity of drinking water, alternatively depend on ground water. As the groundwater is being heavily used for drinking and agricultural purposes, there is a decline in its water table. Therefore, the groundwater resources must be identified and preserved for human survival. This research proposes a data driven approach for forecasting the groundwater level. The monthly variations in groundwater level and rainfall data in three observation wells located in Brahmavar, Kundapur and Hebri were investigated and the scenarios were examined for 2000-2013. The focus of this research work is to develop an ANN based groundwater level forecasting model and compare with hybrid ANN-PSO forecasting model. The model parameters are tested using different combinations of the data. The results reveal that PSO-ANN based hybrid model gives a better prediction accuracy, than ANN alone.