Flood Susceptibility Modeling in a Subtropical Humid Low-Relief Alluvial Plain Environment: Application of Novel Ensemble Machine Learning Approach

This study has developed a new ensemble model and tested another ensemble model for flood susceptibility mapping in the Middle Ganga Plain (MGP). The results of these two models have been quantitatively compared for performance analysis in zoning flood susceptible areas of low altitudinal range, humid subtropical fluvial floodplain environment of the Middle Ganga Plain (MGP). This part of the MGP, which is in the central Ganga River Basin (GRB), is experiencing worse floods in the changing climatic scenario causing an increased level of loss of life and property. The MGP experiencing monsoonal subtropical humid climate, active tectonics induced ground subsidence, increasing population, and shifting landuse/landcover trends and pattern, is the best natural laboratory to test all the susceptibility prediction genre of models to achieve the choice of best performing model with the constant number of input parameters for this type of topoclimatic environmental setting. This will help in achieving the goal of model universality, i.e., finding out the best performing susceptibility prediction model for this type of topoclimatic setting with the similar number and type of input variables. Based on the highly accurate flood inventory and using 12 flood predictors (FPs) (selected using field experience of the study area and literature survey), two machine learning (ML) ensemble models developed by bagging frequency ratio (FR) and evidential belief function (EBF) with classification and regression tree (CART), CART-FR and CART-EBF, were applied for flood susceptibility zonation mapping. Flood and non-flood points randomly generated using flood inventory have been apportioned in 70:30 ratio for training and validation of the ensembles. Based on the evaluation performance using threshold-independent evaluation statistic, area under receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve, 14 threshold-dependent evaluation metrices, and seed cell area index (SCAI) meant for assessing different aspects of ensembles, the study suggests that CART-EBF (AUCSR = 0.843; AUCPR = 0.819) was a better performant than CART-FR (AUCSR = 0.828; AUCPR = 0.802). The variability in performances of these novel-advanced ensembles and their comparison with results of other published models espouse the need of testing these as well as other genres of susceptibility models in other topoclimatic environments also. Results of this study are important for natural hazard managers and can be used to compute the damages through risk analysis.

Statistical Analysis of Major Flood Events During 1980-2015 in Middle Ganga Plain, Ganga River Basin, India

To understand the vicious nature of extreme flood events for the most flood prone region of Ganga River Basin, this study uses 36 years (1980-2015) of flood records from Dartmouth Flood Observatory (DFO) and the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT). Further, the Water Level (WL) data collected from Central Water Commission (CWC) for same period are utilized to compare with the data of DFO and EM-DAT to identify the major flood events recorded in the Middle Ganga Plain (MGP). The final dataset comprises of 15 attributes (parameters) and is prepared of identified 99 flood instances for statistical analysis. The descriptive statistical analysis is performed for the following parameters: severity class, flood duration in days, affected flood area, flood magnitude, total number of deaths, and total count of displaced people. The graphical representation of all selected parameters provides an insight of common flood events, which lie between ±95% confidence level and exclude the major events as outliers.

Analysis of Relationship between Vegetation Indices and Land Surface Temperature using GIS and Python in Middle Ganga Plain, India

Global vegetation dynamics is a significant phenomenon being monitored from space. This study attempts to establish relationship among vegetation changes and land surface temperature using the data derived from satellite products in the Middle Ganga Plain, India using python programming. Ten years of MODIS Land Surface Temperature (LST) on board Terra, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index/Enhanced Vegetation Index (NDVI/EVI) (1km spatial and 8-days composite temporal resolution for LST and 250m spatial and 16-days composite for NDVI/EVI) has been used in this study. The average LST for the month of January was 23.0°C which fell to 15.7°C for the same month in 2015; whereas in March it was recorded to be 35.3°C and reduced to 32.3°C in 2015. Mean NDVI value has been recorded to be 0.44 in January 2000 which has slightly increased to reach 0.50 for the same month in 2015. For the month of September, it was recorded at 0.49 in 2000 and 0.52 for the same month in 2015. This paper attempts to analyze the spatio-temporal distribution and empirical relationship of vegetation cover and LST using Python.