Geographic Information System and Remote Sensing Applications in Flood Hazards Management: A Review

The purpose of this study is to examine and review the various applications of GIS and remote
sensing tools in flood disaster management as opposed to the conventional means of recording the hydrological
parameters, which in many cases failed to capture an extreme event. In the recent years, GIS along with remote
sensing has become the key tools in flood disaster monitoring and management. Advancement particularly in
the area of remote sensing application has developed gradually from optical remote sensing to microwave or
radar remote sensing, which has proved a profound capability of penetrating a clouded sky and provided all
weather capabilities compared to the later (optical remote sensing) in flood monitoring, mapping, and
management. The main concern here is delineation of flood prone areas and development of flood hazard maps
indicating the risk areas likely to be inundated by significant flooding along with the damageable objects maps
for the flood susceptible areas. Actually, flood depth is always considered to be the basic aspect in flood hazard
mapping, and therefore in determining or estimating the flood depth, a Digital Elevation Model data (DEM)
is considered to be the most appropriate means of determining the flood depth from a remotely sensed data or
hydrological data. Accuracy of flood depth estimation depends mainly on the resolution of the DEM data in
a flat terrain and in the regions that experiences monsoon seasons such as the developing countries of Asia
where there is a high dependence on agriculture, which made any effort for flood estimation or flood hazard
mapping difficult due to poor availability of high resolution DEM. More so the idea of Web-based GIS is
gradually becoming a reality, which plays an important role in the flood hazard management. Therefore, this
paper provides a review of applications of GIS and remote sensing technology in flood disaster monitoring and
management.