Flood Susceptibility Assessment of Wyra River Catchment, South India using AHP-GIS Multi Criteria Approach

Floods can create natural disasters that cause widespread damage such as destroying people’s lives and resources in the social and environmental domains. Flooding is extreme and periodic due to climate change and the acceleration of human-influenced land-use modification, which increases the force in the river pathways and due to these alterations, the river morphology changes. To reduce flood damage, mapping and analysis of flood susceptibility are crucial components of flood reduction and mitigation procedures which recognize most at-risk regions according to physical features that identify the probability of inundation. With the use of geographic information systems (GIS), multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and remote sensing (RS), this study attempts to generate a map of the Wyra catchment's flood risk. Nine thematic maps have been developed: slope, soil type, elevation, land use/land cover, topographic wetness index, rainfall and distance from rivers, drainage density and road distance maps. The Wyra catchment area is about 3443 km2. According to this research, about 11.60% were in a zone of risk, vulnerable to flooding. Around 84.33% and 4.06% were moderate and low-risk zones respectively. This study provides efficiency in terms of time and funds for the flooding procedure in the catchment of Wyra. As a result, flood forecasting, early detection and control will be helpful for planners of land use and decision-makers to lessen the effects of flood vulnerability and future damages within the Wyra watershed.