Abstract
Floods are the most frequent and destructive natural disasters causing damages to human lives and their properties every year around the world. Pakistan in general and the Peshawar Vale, in particular, is vulnerable to recurrent floods due to its unique physiography. Peshawar Vale is drained by River Kabul and its major tributaries namely, River Swat, River Jindi, River Kalpani, River Budhni and River Bara. Kabul River has a length of approximately 700 km, out of which 560 km is in Afghanistan and the rest falls in Pakistan. Looking at the physiography and prevailing flood characteristics, the development of a flood hazard model is required to provide feedback to decision-makers for the sustainability of the livelihoods of the inhabitants. Peshawar Vale is a flood-prone area, where recurrent flood events have caused damages to standing crops, agricultural land, sources of livelihood earnings and infrastructure. The objective of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the ANN algorithm in the determination of flood inundated areas. The ANN algorithm was implemented in C# for the prediction of inundated areas using nine flood causative factors, that is, drainage network, river discharge, rainfall, slope, flow accumulation, soil, surface geology, flood depth and land use. For the preparation of spatial geodatabases, thematic layers of the drainage network, river discharge, rainfall, slope, flow accumulation, soil, surface geology, flood depth and land use were generated in the GIS environment. A Neural Network of nine, six and one neurons for the first, second and output layers, respectively, were designed and subsequently developed. The output and the resultant product of the Neural Network approach include flood hazard mapping and zonation of the study area. Parallel to this, the performance of the model was evaluated using Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Correlation coefficient (R2). This study has further highlighted the applicability and capability of the ANN in flood hazard mapping and zonation. The analysis revealed that the proposed model is an effective and viable approach for flood hazard analysis and zonation.
Highlights
Floods are among the most devastating, recurrent and widespread natural disasters causing damages to human lives and their properties [1,2,3,4]
This paper is aimed at utilizing the combined data obtained from hydrometric and rain-gauge stations, satellite imageries, Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial analysis functions and thematic data layers in the form of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) Algorithm for assessment, prediction, zonation and spatial modeling of floods in the Peshawar valley of Kabul River Basin
Data were collected from these stations for the last 40 years (1980–2019) data about the Kabul River discharge have been collected from Flood Forecasting Division (FFD), Lahore for the last 40 years
Summary
Floods are among the most devastating, recurrent and widespread natural disasters causing damages to human lives and their properties [1,2,3,4]. Floods are the Sustainability 2021, 13, 13953. Sustainability 2021, 13, 13953 major natural disasters affecting many countries across the world [5]. Floods are natural phenomena occurring in all the rivers and natural drainage systems from time to time [6,7]. Flood damages have been aggravated by the rapid developmental activities and climate change exacerbations [9,10]. Extreme precipitation events in the catchment areas are among the leading causes of floods [5,11]. Floods are intensified by a variety of factors like high river discharge, encroachment towards flood channels and developmental activities in the active floodplain [12]
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