Estimation And Simulation Of Flood Inundation Using Remote Sensing And GIS

China is a country in which flood is one of the severe disaster and occurred frequently. As one of the most important properties of flood disaster, flood inundation has always been the focus of research on flood. Using remote sensing method to extract flood inundated area has great advantages compared with field observation, which not only saves the cost of observation, but also reduces the risk. GIS is a useful system integration tool that can manage remote sensing, topography, hydrology and other sources of data comprehensively, and can provide powerful data processing and analysis methods and simulation analysis.In this paper, a new method for estimating the flood inundation is proposed, which is based on the situation of lack satellite image data. Vegetation index method and soil water content method were used to extract the differences of vegetation and soil before and after the flood, and then estimate the maximum range of flood inundation by seed flooding algorithm using DEM data. The Landsat TM, ETM data and DEM data are used in this paper. The results showed that in plain region with high vegetation cover and more vegetation types, the vegetation index method can be used to estimate the flood inundated area; and in the river valley area with low vegetation cover and less vegetation types, the soil water content method is better. Compared the results with the data from the field survey and the data from the satellite image of the second day after the flood shows that the estimation method can be used to extract the flood inundation. Compared the simulation result based on DEM using 8-direction seed-spread algorithm, the estimation result had better accuracy. This method can be used in the study of historical flood which is lack of archive data.Finally, we designed a software system to accomplish this method called Flood Inundation Estimate and Simulate System. This System built by integration development technology of AE and IDL under.NET framework. The design provided a feasible solution for the professional software systems which will use remote sensing and GIS technology simultaneously.