Climate change has often resulted in severe droughts in a rice-farming season (i.e., April to June), and the large amount of water resources were needed to cope with droughts during the season. Therefore, the subsurface dam, which is able to store groundwater resources in the alluvium aquifer, has been considered to be an alternative for securing more groundwater resources. In this study, suitable sites assessment criteria for agricultural subsurface dam using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) were established for adequate drought management. Moreover, the criteria were applied to the existing five agricultural subsurface dams to verify their applicability of groundwater supply for each subsurface dam. The assessment criteria were divided into three major categories (geology, hydrology and business condition) and classified to 12 individual sub-categories with weighting. From the assessment, Ian subsurface dam and Wooil subsurface dam were identified as the best and the worst suitable site, respectively, and this result was in accordance with the average amount of annual groundwater supply by each subsurface dam during the period of 2011-2017.

Keywords: Subsurface dam;Groundwater supply;Suitable site assessment criteria;Analytic hierarchy process (AHP);