Abstract:

The study area covers an area of 6.0667 hectares in Kerman Province, located in the southern and southeastern parts of Bam city. It includes several main watercourses and their tributaries, which flow in a general south-to-north direction over ancient and recent alluvial fans. Due to heavy rainfall, a significant volume of runoff is generated, which enters Bam city from the southern sections as floods, causing extensive damage to residential and commercial areas located along the city’s ring road.

This study aims to identify suitable areas for flood spreading based on geological and hydrogeological criteria, not only to control flooding but also to recharge the groundwater aquifer in the region. Some of the most important criteria include the type of alluvial fans, aquifer type, surface permeability, aquifer transmission capacity, alluvial quality, groundwater quality, topographic slope, and the thickness of the unsaturated zone as well as the depth to bedrock.

Subsequently, the importance of classes in each of the informational layers was determined using a pairwise weighting method. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was employed to integrate the information layers, arranging the location criteria in a decision tree according to their importance and determining their weights. In this context, the GIS was utilized to combine these information layers raster-wise, and a suitability index was calculated for each pixel.