APPLICATION OF REMOTE SENSING AND GIS FOR CYCLONE DISASTER MANAGEMENT IN COASTAL AREA: A CASE STUDY AT BARGUNA DISTRICT, BANGLADESH

Abstract

Bangladesh is one of the top vulnerable countries to the climate change and the adverse impact on the country will be catastrophic because of convergence of climate change, poverty and large population. The frequency of natural disasters like floods, cyclones etc have increased significantly over the last decade particularly in the coastal line of Bangladesh which is asserted as the impact of climate change. The consequences of these disasters are a huge loss of lives and properties that implicates the economy of the country. So disaster management is now an important concern to minimize all those losses. Disaster management of an event like Cyclone, Flood or Earthquake etc. requires some ingredients, such as, response, incident mapping, establishing priorities, developing action plans and implementing the plan to protect lives, property and the environment. GIS in combination with Remote Sensing (RS), can be used very effectively to identify hazards and risk for cyclone. In Bangladesh, cyclone and tidal surge are considered as the most catastrophic phenomena for coastal regions. From the historical data, it is seen that during the years 1797 to 2009, Bangladesh has been hit by 65 severe cyclones, 35 of which were accompanied by storm surges. Some cases the surge height was more than 6 meters which created devastating situation for the people and for the country as well. The main focus of the study is to develop a model that could be used for disaster planning and management. A storm surge model has been developed integrating historical cyclone data with Digital Elevation Model (DEM), which generates the cyclone hazard maps for different return periods. Satellite images and field survey data are used in GIS and RS platform to assess the vulnerability of lives and infrastructures. Cyclone risk in terms of casualty is assessed considering the hazard and vulnerability analysis for the study area which can be implied to give a signal of awareness to the local community and the decision makers to provide advance planning for cyclone disaster management.