Study on the Remote Sensing Spectral Method for Disaster Loss Inversion in Urban Flood Areas

Abstract

To address the problems of traditional hydrological and hydraulic methods of estimating disasters in urban flood areas, such as small scale, poor timeliness, and difficulty of obtaining data, an inversion method of estimating urban flood disaster area based on remote sensing spectroscopy is proposed. In this paper, the spatial distribution of urban flood disasters is first inverted based on large-scale multidimensional remote sensing spectral orthography. Then, spatial coupling inversion of the remote sensing spectrum-urban economy-flood disaster is performed by simulating the urban economic density through single spectral remote sensing at night. Finally, losses at the urban flood area are estimated. The results show that (1) the heavy rain in Henan Province on 20 July is centered in Zhengzhou, and the spatial distribution of urban flood disasters accords with Zipf’s law; (2) the estimated damage to the urban flood area in Henan Province is 132,256 billion yuan, and Zhengzhou has the most serious losses at 43,147 billion yuan, accounting for 32.6% of the entire province’s losses. These results are consistent with the official data (accuracy ≥ 90%, R2 ≥ 0.95). This study can provide a new approach for accurately and efficiently estimating urban flood damage at a large scale.

Keywords

• urban flooding
• disaster loss assessment
• spatial distribution
• remote sensing inversion
• rainfall index