GIS based Mathematical Model for Flood Disaster Response

Sustainable hazards mitigation will not eliminate the need for emergency preparedness and disaster response to deal with the physical destruction, losses, and human suffering imposed by disasters. Disaster response activities include emergency sheltering, search and rescue, care of the injured, fire fighting, damage assessment, and other emergency measures. Disaster responders must also cope with response generated demands such as the need for coordination, communications, ongoing situation assessment, and resource mobilization during the emergency period (Mileti, 1999). Mathematical model play an important role in flood disaster response by providing expected inundation locations, depth and duration, which can drastically improve the effectiveness of disaster response. Especially, GIS based distributed hydrological models are considered to be very suitable for such objectives. High level of accuracy of outputs of such models is of utmost importance for any decision making process in flood risk management. Assuming that mathematical formulation and solving process of governing equations of flow in different hydrologic processes are considered properly, the level of accuracy of model outputs entirely depend on the accuracy of the input spatial and temporal datasets. In flood inundation modeling, topography is one of the spatial datasets that affect the accuracy of model outputs to a great extent. In this paper, a GIS based hydrologic model is introduced and impact of topography data on model output was analysed for a Japanese river basin. 1