Methodology for flood damage assessment using GIS and distributed hydrologic model

Flood damage assessment has great importance in flood disaster mitigation. After a flood event, quick damage assessment is important for many purposes such as flood relief work, estimation of financial supports for affected people, evaluation of flood insurance, etc. Prior estimation of flood damage based on forecasted rainfall help taking preventive measures. Also, it supports in decision making for structural measures for flood control. In this study, a flood damage assessment methodology is proposed which is a combination of hydrologic model and damage assessment model. The methodology can be used for quick assessment of damage after a flood event as well as flood for forecasted flood events. The methodology is being applied in one river basin in Japan. The detailed GIS database and some preliminary results of flood model are presented in this paper

Wetland database : A tool for land use decisions

Land use decisions are made at the local level by lay boards and comminissions in the 169 Connecticut cities and towns. Board members need information that is easy to understand and is technically defensible as a planning tool. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) recognized that need and partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to develop a method to evaluate the functions and values of wetlands (Ammann, 1986) for use by people with limited scientific knowledge of wetlands. The results of this method provide the city/town with resource information of all wetlands in the project area, a comparative rating system for 14 values, functions and uses of the wetlands, maps ready for digitizing into a geographic information system (GIS), and graphs and tables. This method does not determine which wetland value, function, or use is most important to the community. The community determines importance values. The wetland database allows the towns to view wetlands as a system rather than looking at each wetland as an isolated unit

Energy based seismic design and evaluation procedures for reinforced concrete bridge columns

This project is concerned with the experimental determination and computational micromodeling of energy absorption or cyclic fatigue capacity of reinforced concrete bridge piers. The results are used with a new smooth hysteretic rule to generate seismic energy demand spectra. By comparing the ratio of energy capacity to demand, inferences of column damageability can be made.(AU)