Flood Mapping along the Lower Mekong River in Cambodia

Abstract

Located in Southeast Asia, Cambodia is one of the most disaster prone countries, where flooding rank the top of the natural disaster. Flood affects and threatens not only humans’ and animal’s life, properties, infrastructures, but it is also an obstacle to the current development. Furthermore, without having the efficient modern technology to predict flood situation in Cambodia, the disaster in this country become more serious. The objective of this research study is to simulate flood inundation area by using software HEC-RAS. HEC-RAS is a hydraulic model software capable of calculating any hydraulic river study including flood. In this study, the Lower Mekong River with approximately 50 km length was selected to delineate flood map from 2000 until 2013 and also 10-year return period map. The available data are 11 years of the measured water level at the upstream and downstream stations, 18 surveyed cross-sections and DEM with grid cell size 30 m x 30 m were used to understand the recurrence of the floods in the study area. The output from the model was delineated into map including flood extent and flood depth from 2000 until 2013 (without 2009, 2010 and 2012). The results show that flooding varied from year to year; however, the greatest flood was during 2000 and again in 2011. The simulated flood maps were compared with observed data to figure out that the model was accurate for flood mapping. These results will be useful for river engineers, experts, and decision makers to manage river floods.