Combined Application of Multi-Criteria Decision Making Methods and Remote Sensing Systems for Flood Cellular Zoning of Abolabbas River Basin in Khuzestan Province

Flood is one of the most common and dangerous natural disasters occurring worldwide (Samanta et al., 2018). Iran is ranked sixth in the world in terms of flooding (Khosroshahi and Saghafian, 2003) due to the disturbance of the hydrological balance of the country's watersheds, of which Abolabbas River Basin is no exception. In effect, due to the hydrological imbalance of the watershed, the river runoff cannot be transferred well (Tehrany et al., 2013). Given that each part of the basin has a certain potential in the production of runoffs and floods, once water overflows into the surrounding lands floods occur. It is thus necessary to prepare flood sensitivity maps and identify susceptible areas for flood prevention and management (Bout et al., 2018). This study was thus intended to prepare hazard maps for different parts of the watershed, and to prioritize the effective parameters in the occurrence of floods in the study area.

This study considered 11 important indicators including altitude, runoff curve number, slope, slope direction, rainfall, vegetation, drainage density, distance from waterway, land use, stream power index and topographic wetness index to determine the flood potential of Abolabbas River Basin with an area of 281.23 square kilometers. For the purpose of this study, the layers were scaled and the individual pixels were weighted and then prioritized using the TOPSIS technique (Rasooli et al., 2018).