A multi-criteria analysis (MCA) approach to describe the effective utilization of geospatial techniques for disaster risk reduction at village level in Kopili River Basin (KRB) of Assam State, India is presented. The KRB is chronically flood affected due to seasonal monsoon and rise in water levels of Kopili River. Based on the MCA approach using flood hazard layer derived from the spatio-multi-temporal historic satellite data-sets (comprising of sensors from RISAT-1 SAR, Radarsat SAR and IRS AWiFS), socio-economic data (based on five census variables), infrastructure (road network) and land use vulnerabilities (cropped and uncropped areas), flood risk zones are derived. Our study elucidates that 24,837 ha of crop area spread across 95 villages in the KRB falls in high risk zone, about 39,209 ha distributed in 150 villages falls under moderate-high risk zones and remaining area spread over 162 villages is more or less unaffected. The proposed approach can be applied elsewhere in other river basins to estimate the flood risk so as to mitigate the disaster risk posed by the floods.

Kopili River Basin is one of the chronic flood affected basins of Brahmaputra River, lies in north-eastern part of India. This study attempts to utilize the historical spatial data on flood inundation layers derived from multi-temporal remote sensing images for identifying villages falling in various flood hazard severity zones. A total of 183 flood events were mapped in the basin in the last two decades. About 3.89 lakh hectares which is 29% of Kopili River Basin area is affected by floods during 1977, 1988 and 1998-2015. The flood hazard zonation frequency is determined treating each village as minimum unit of entity and based on the number of times affected by flood events in a given year. About 742 villages are categorized as very low to low and 396 villages fall in moderate flood hazard zone and more than 150 villages are categorized between high to very high flood hazard zones.

No abstract

No abstract