Remote Sensing and GIS-Based Flood Vulnerability Assessment in Jiangxi Province in China

Abstract

Vulnerability assessment acquaints us with degree of risks in global-environmental-change context. Remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) is seldom applied to assess comprehensive vulnerability as indispensable socioeconomic factors are hardly expressed by them. Thus we selected counties in Jiangxi Province as study area, calculated vulnerability index VI of them by aggregating sixteen indicators and another index VIRG by aggregating five indicators which could be exactly express by RS and GIS data, and construct exponential formulation between them. Some testing counties were used to check the precision of flood vulnerability categorization by fitted value of VI yielded by exponential formulation between VI and VIRG. Thematic maps of flood vulnerability categorization by VI and fitted value of VI illustrate identical spatial distribution pattern despite existence of wrongly-categorized cases. The overall precision of vulnerability assessment reaches 81.3%. RS and GIS techniques are possible even promising to be applied in comprehensively assessing flood vulnerability.