Flood havoc during 2019 in the Sangu River basin caused widespread damage to residents, crops, roads, and communications in parts of hills in Bangladesh. Developing flood hazard maps can play an essential step in risks management. For this purpose, this study assessed 12 hydro‐geomorphological factors, namely, topographic wetness index, elevation, slope, extreme rainfall, land‐use and land‐cover, soil type, lithology, curvature, drainage density, aspect, height above the nearest drainage, and distance from streams. Maps prepared by individual application of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytical Network Process (ANP) exhibit validation scores ranging from 0.77 to 0.79. It is found that the ANP‐based model under 1‐day maximum rainfall denotes a reliable hazard map presenting comparable accuracy to the field results. The hazard map under 100‐year return periods shows that a total of 0.71 million population living downstream is prone to “very high” flood because of its lowland morphology, mild slope, and high drainage density. Alarmingly, 39% of roads, 43% of farming lands, and 25% of education buildings are observed to lie in the highest flood‐prone area. Details on subdistrict level exposures have the potential to serve the decision‐makers and planners in site selection for flood management strategies and setting priorities for remedial measures.
The climate science and applications communities need a broad and demand‐driven concept to assess physical climate conditions that are relevant for impacts on human and natural systems. Here, we augment the description of the “climatic impact‐driver” (CID) approach adopted in the Working Group I (WGI) contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. CIDs are broadly defined as “physical climate system conditions (e.g., means, events, and extremes) that affect an element of society or ecosystems. Depending on system tolerance, CIDs and their changes can be detrimental, beneficial, neutral, or a mixture of each across interacting system elements and regions.” We give background information on the IPCC Report process that led to the development of the 7 CID types (heat and cold, wet and dry, wind, snow and ice, coastal, open ocean, and other) and 33 distinct CID categories, each of which may be evaluated using a variety of CID indices. This inventory of CIDs was co‐developed with WGII to provide a useful collaboration point between physical climate scientists and impacts/risk experts to assess the specific climatic phenomena driving sectoral responses and identify relevant CID indices within each sector. The CID Framework ensures that a comprehensive set of climatic conditions informs adaptation planning and risk management and may also help prioritize improvements in modeling sectoral dynamics that depend on climatic conditions. CIDs contribute to climate services by increasing coherence and neutrality when identifying and communicating relevant findings from physical climate research to risk assessment and planning activities.
10 September 2017 in International Journal of Climatology
Monitoring of crop growth and forecasting its yield well before harvest is very important for crop and food management. Remote sensing images are capable of identifying crop health, as well as predicting its yield. Vegetation indices (VIs), such as the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), leaf area index (LAI) and fraction of photosynthetically active radiation (fPAR) calculated from remotely sensed data have been widely used to monitor crop growth and to predict crop yield. This study used 8 day TERRA MODIS reflectance data of 500 m resolution for the years 2005 to 2006 to estimate the yield of potato in the Munshiganj area of Bangladesh. The satellite data has been validated using ground truth data from fields of 50 farmers. Regression models are developed between VIs and field level potato yield for six administrative units of Munshiganj District. The yield prediction equations have high coefficients of correlation (R2) and are 0.84, 0.72 and 0.80 for the NDVI, LAI and fPAR, respectively. These equations were validated by using data from 2006 to 2007 seasons and found that an average error of estimation is about 15% for the study region. It can be concluded that VIs derived from remote sensing can be an effective tool for early estimation of potato yield.