Mapping Land Cover Damages in Mega Floods through Integration of Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques

Abstract

Today we are encircled by multiple problems, such as global warming, drought, wildfires, Hurricanes and tropical storms etc; among them flooding is one of the major problems; however, the flood hazards are probably rising due to an amalgamation of environmental and socio-economic effects. Therefore, flood safety measurements are more essential to avoid barriers toward major development in society associated to environment, which requires modern and accurate steps for preventing the impacts of flood on population and properties. Floods are among the most destructive physical vulnerabilities on earth’s surface, which cause major economic and social damages rather than any other natural incidence. However, the flood problem begins because the human beings are using river floodplains. In this research our focus is to identify and measure extent and impacts such as Infrastructural, loss of Agriculture, Built-up (Houses), natural vegetation and property along Indus river due to heavy flooding of 2010, to achieve our purpose, two different years landsat imageries before and after flood i.e September 2009 and September 2010 have been applied and the desire results were achieved through integration of Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographical Information System (GIS) techniques. With the help of RS data, hazardous impacts of flooding 2010 have been observed on the bases of different factors which were performed on Arc Map 10.3.1, Erdas Imagine 9.2, eCognition Developer 64. After performing different analysis, the major losses have been observed which are shown in table 1to4 and further highlighted in Figure 5a to 8g.