Site Selection of Wastewater Treatment Plant using RS/GIS data and Multi- Criteria Analysis (MCA): Case Study Omdurman City, Khartoum State, Sudan

Abstract

Abstract: Omdurman city is one of the biggest cities in Sudan in term of area and population. The city witness a rapid growth of population coupled with huge aerial expansion. This situation creates big environmental complications and hazards. One of biggest pollution issues in the city is the lack of modern and efficient Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP). The purpose of this study is to build a decision making model for selecting the optimal site for a WWTP utilizing the remote sensing and GIS data and analysis coupled with the Multi- Criteria Analysis (MCA). The utilized data comprise the remote sensing data of optical multispectral satellite imageries and the digital elevation model coupled with vector data of land used and land cover (LU/LC) layers. Various positive and exclamations criteria have been built from the RS/GIS data, while the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used to apply the weights for each criterion and sub criterion, in order to get the best result and find the optimal site. The obtained result presents three sites of high weights in the main criteria and lows in exclamation ones representing in-preferable sites; the sites are ranked as the first, second and third rank, which are located in the west, south and north of Omdurman city, respectively. Each of the three sites contains subzones of very suitable, suitable and unsuitable, where the first site renders high suitability over the others. Although all aims are achieved in this study, but there are still some limitations in different perspectives of the study such as details of data, determining the criteria and weights, which can be overcome by utilizing a high spatial resolution RS/GIS data to improve the MCA studies.