1. College of Geo-exploration Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130026, China;
2. Hohhot Center of Natural Resources Comprehensive Survey, China Geological Survey, Hohhot 010010, China;
3. Xining Center of Natural Resources Comprehensive Survey, China Geological Survey, Xining 810000, China

In order to quickly and accurately predict the groundwater distribution rule in arid climate, GRS-FAI was used to evaluate the groundwater enrichment capacity. According to the special climatic environment of ar-id area, the parameters of GRSFAI were modified to make it more suitable for the evaluation of the groundwater sit-uation in arid areas and finally it was determined that five indexes, including lithology, geomorphic type, slope, flow accumulation and vegetation coverage were used to construct GRSFAI. These five indexes were interpreted and extracted using GF1, Landsat8 OLI data, topographic maps and other data. GRSFAI was constructed by fuzzy mathematics and analytic hierarchy process, and the correlation between water volume produced from the water bore in the study area and GRSFAI was analyzed, and the correlation coefficient was 0.77. The distribution characteris-tics of GRSFAI in the studied area were then used to predict the distribution of groundwater, and the prediction re-sults were verified. It is proved that GRSFAI can accurately reflect the distribution of shallow groundwater in arid areas, and the evaluation results are reliable. GRSFAI is recommended in the exploration of groundwater resources in similar area.