Hybrid ensemble modeling for flash flood potential assessment and susceptibility analysis of a Himalayan river catchment

Abstract

The occurrence of frequent flash floods in the Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand causes massive destruction and damage to life and property every year. In this study, five bivariate statistical models, namely Frequency Ratio, Fuzzy Membership Value, Weights of Evidence (WOE), Statistical Index (SI), and Information Value (IV), were individually integrated with the Index of Entropy (IOE). These models were employed to calculate the flash flood potential index and identify susceptible zones in the Mandakini River Basin. 39 flash flood locations, 39 non-flash flood locations, and 15 flash flood conditioning factors were utilized for training and testing the models with 70% and 30% of the dataset, respectively. The model performances were examined using receiver operating characteristics curves. This best prediction rate performance was featured by SI-IOE and IV-IOE with an AUC = 0.896 followed by WOE-IOE (AUC = 0.889). The results revealed that the areas with high and very high susceptibility cover approximately 40% of the study area.

Keywords:

• Flash flood susceptibility
• Indian Himalayas
• GIS
• information value
• index of entropy

Acknowledgments

We wish to express a deep sense of gratitude and sincere thanks to the Department of Water Resources Development and Management (WRD&M), IIT Roorkee, for providing a conducive environment and resources to conduct the research work. We also thank and highly appreciate Disaster Management and Mitigation Centre, Uttarakhand, for the support offered to obtain the flash flood event locations data.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest. This manuscript has not been published or presented elsewhere in part or in its entirety and is not under consideration by another journal.

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the manuscript in the form of tables and supplemental material.