INTEGRATING MULTICRITERIA ANALYSIS WITH GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR THE EVALUATION THE FLOOD VULNERABLE AREAS

11th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference SGEM2011, www.sgem.org, SGEM2011 Conference Proceedings/ ISSN 1314-2704, June 20-25, 2011, Vol. 2, 433-440 pp

ABSTRACT

Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, flash floods, volcanic eruptions and landslides have always constituted a major problem in many developing and developed countries. Flood disaster has very special place in natural hazards and is considered as
a major natural hazard due to its devastating effects on the affected area. Its effected area is not bounded; it is an unusual event of river basin. Flood related problems and many other applications proved that these problems could be solved through planning
studies and detailed projects about flood prone areas. Determining the flood vulnerable areas is important for decision makers for planning and management activities.
multicriteria analysis methods (MCA) are used to analyze the flood vulnerable areas. Geographical information system (GIS) applications are used for managing, producing, analyzing and combining spatial data. The aim in integrating MCA with GIS is to
provide more flexible and more accurate decisions to the decision makers in order to evaluate the effective factors. Some of the causative factors for flooding in watershed are taken into account as annual rainfall, size of watershed, land use and the type of soil.
The selection of criteria that has spatial reference is an important step in MCA. The objective of this article is to describe phases applied in study to analyze the flood vulnerability structure: to determine effective factors causing flood and to apply several
approaches to MCE in GIS environment to evaluate in finding the flood vulnerable areas, by using selected factors flood causing to generate a composite map for decision makers.

Keywords: floods, causative factors, multicriteria analysis, geographical information systems