Performance measures of frequency ratio, weight of evidence and AHP models for flood risk assessment of Panchganga river basin (PRB), Kolhapur (India)

Abstract

Flood events are the most common and frequent natural disasters causing enormous loss to property and life worldwide. In this study, the Panchganga River Basin (PRB) was selected for flood susceptibility mapping using the frequency ratio (FR), weight of evidence (WoE) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) model with remote sensing and GIS based approach. For this, a flood inventory with 224 historic flood locations was prepared using Google Earth Engine. About 75% of flood locations were randomly selected for training and 25% for testing purposes. The flood susceptibility map prepared using FR, WoE and AHP model was classified into five zones such as very high, high, moderate, low risk and safe zone using ArcGIS software. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were plotted with area under curve (AUC) of 89.27%, 87.34% and 80.60% for FR, WoE and AHP models respectively. The present study will help people near Panchganga river to move to a safer place during flooding. The flood risk zone maps are extremely helpful in infrastructural developments, town planning and civil protection.