Ecology, Environment and Conservation Paper

A GIS-BASED APPROACH FOR ASSESSING THE VULNERABILITY OF MAJOR ROADS TO FLOODING USING PUBLICLY AVAILABLE DATA

Tarig A. Ali, Akmal Abdelfatah, Abhijit Doshi and Munawar Sarker

Abstract

Many cities in the Arabian Peninsula have witnessed severe floods in recent years, which resulted in inundation of many parts of roadways. The goal of this study was to develop an approach for assessing the vulnerability of roadways to flooding. The study considered Dubai, UAE to implement the proposed approach, which utilizes Logistic Regression and Statistical Index Method, considering precipitation, topography, temperature, soils, slope, and land use as the conditioning factors of flooding to produce roadways vulnerability-to-flooding (VTF) map. The daily precipitation average on March 9 derived from NASA’s TRMM dataset was used to validate the VTF map. Validation was carried out using the Geographically Weighted Regression method. The resulted R-Squared and Root-Mean-Square Error values were 68.7% and 2.35, respectively. Results showed that no exact pattern exists for roadways segments that are vulnerable to flooding. Study demonstrated the usefulness of using these methods within GIS to create roadways VTF map.