Morphometric Analysis and Flood Hazard Assessment of Damodar River Basin of India Through Multi-criteria Decision Analysis

Floods are seasonal and common all over the world, with different characteristics and damage levels causing heavy damages to the man-made structures, loss of life and resources. There are no permeant solutions are given by the researchers due to adaption of new technologies with integrated analysis. The main aim of the current study is to assess the flood hazard of the Damodar River Basin (DRB), which shares the boundaries of two states and faces a fluvial flood crisis almost every year. The Landsat 8 TM remote sensing satellite image has been used for land use and land cover classification (NRSC, NRSC. (2014). Land use/Land cover database on 1:50,000 scale, Natural resources census project, LUCMD, LRUMG, RSAA, National remote sensing centre, ISRO.). The SRTM DEM has been used for other morphometric analyses like, Slope, drainage density, relative relief, and flow accumulation. Remote sensing techniques were combined with Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) with GIS platform in the study. The Saaty’s Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) weighted overlay analysis have been employed to assess the flood hazard in the study area. The Consistency Ratio is being calculated for validation of the weight assigned to each parameter, and it shows nearly 0.05, which is an acceptable rate that is less than CR ≤ 0.1. The result shows that 40% of the basin’s area falls under vulnerable to flood, which is verified with the previous flood incidents. This present study proved that the geoinformatics tools and techniques are the powerful tools for the decision makers for the implementation of preventive measures to safeguarding the community.