Assessment of a Regional Flood Disaster Indicator via an Entropy Weighting Method

Abstract

With the limited resources for disaster prevention and reduction, it is crucial that a flooding disaster hazard level is established. Therefore, this study establishes the flooding disaster indicator (FDI), which serves as the basis for determining the hazard levels of flooded regions. The first step was to analyze the historical flooding data. Normalization factors were obtained in accordance with the characteristics of the various data. In turn, the normalization factors were analyzed for their entropy, which determined a weighting value. Finally, various factors were integrated into the FDI based on their weighting values. When real disaster events were surveyed, the proposed FDI had a positive correlation with the ratio of flooding area to total village area and a FDI>.6. Predicted affected households were significantly increased. The FDI can categorize the regional differences in the extent of flood hazards.