Abstract
This study presents a spatially aware machine learning model for probabilistic groundwater potential assessment using multimodal geospatial data derived from topography, hydrotopography, climate, soil, land use, Sentinel-1 SAR, and water balance variables. The model incorporates spatially consistent data partitioning, leakage-controlled model development, and probabilistic forecasting to improve the robustness and transferability of groundwater potential assessment. A total of 2402 spatial observations, including 601 groundwater-related locations and 1801 spatially filtered pseudo-absence samples, were used to evaluate eleven machine learning and deep learning models. The proposed hybrid framework achieved the best overall validation results with ROC-AUC of 0.9319, PR-AUC of 0.8363, F1-measure of 0.8226, balanced accuracy of 0.8847, and MCC of 0.7613. Independent spatial block testing further demonstrated strong generalization ability, showing ROC-AUC of 0.9535, PR-AUC of 0.9002, F1-measure of 0.7983, balanced accuracy of 0.8594, and MCC of 0.7336. Comparative experiments demonstrated that the proposed framework remains competitive with state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning approaches while providing robust probabilistic estimates in spatially separated validation. The resulting groundwater potential maps identify areas with environmental conditions similar to known groundwater observations and provide a reliable basis for prioritizing hydrogeological studies, groundwater exploration, and regional water resources planning in data-poor settings.