DEVELOPMENT OF FLOOD RISK MAP USING GIS FOR

SG. SELANGOR BASIN

ABD JALIL HASSAN, Senior Researcher, National Hydraulic Research Institute of Malaysia
Lot 5377, Jalan Putra Permai, Seri Kembangan, Selangor, Malaysia, jalil@nahrim.gov.moa.my

AMINUDDIN AB. GHANI, Deputy Director, REDAC, University Sains Malaysia, Engineering
Campus, Seri Ampangan,14300 Nibong Tebal, Penang, Malaysia

ROZI ABDULLAH, Research Associate, REDAC, University Sains Malaysia, Engineering

Campus, Seri Ampangan,14300 Nibong Tebal, Penang, Malaysia

Abstract

Flood is a natural disaster in this country. However human activities in many

circumstances change flood behaviour. Activities in the flood plain and catchment such
as land clearing for urbanisation or agriculture, construction of infrastructures such as
highway and road and bridges in the flood plain may increase the magnitude of flood
which increases the damage to the properties and life. The behavior of flood due to
flood mitigation project such as river widening and straightening must well be
understood since this kind of work may transfer the flood problem form upstream to the
downstream part of the river. At present, one of the ways to study and understand the
flood behaviour is by generating the flood extent or flood risk map. A hydraulic modeling
especially computer model is required to carry out the flood simulation to produce flood
level at various location along the river and flood plain. However, to analise a river
system requires tremendous amount of data such as rainfall distribution, river properties
and most important the flood plain topography. GIS software is able to handle the
processing of such problem as and input to the hydraulic model. The output of the
hydraulic simulation can be transferred to GIS software to generate flood layer for
various scenarios. Further analysis such as flood damage assessment can be carried
out for planning and design purpose. The combination of GIS software and hydraulic
software able to speed up the process of producing flood risk map which is suitable for
a decision support system.

This paper presented the work carried out in Sg. Selangor basin in the use of GIS tools
from development of hydrological model, hydrodynamic model, 3D ground model and
generation of flood risk map.

Keyword: GIS, Triangulation Irregular Network, flood, Hydrodynamic modelling, flood

plain , flood risk map, InfoWorks RS
1 Introduction
Malaysia is fortunate to be freed from natural disaster such as earth quake, volcano,
typhoon. The most severe natural disaster experiencing in Malaysia is flood. Two major
type of flood occur in this country are monsoon flood and flash flood. The monsoon flood
occur mainly from Northeast Monsoon which prevails during the months of November to
March with heavy rains to the east coast states of the Peninsula, northern part of Sabah
and southern part of Sarawak. Some of the recorded flood experiences in the country
occur in 1926, 1931, 1947, 1954, 1957, 1963, 1965, 1967, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1983, 1988,
1993, 1998 and 2001. Report from Department of Irrigation and Drainage stated that about
29,000 sq. km or 9% of total land area and more than 4.82 million people (22%) is affected
by flooding annually. Damage cause by flood is estimated about RM915 million. The flood
prone areas are shown in Figure 1.
While monsoon flood is govern by heavy and long duration rainfall, more localised flooding
which covers a large area has been reported in recent years. Flood of October 2-6, 2003
that affected a large area in the northwestern part of the Peninsula covering states of
Kedah, Penang and Northern Perak. Flash flood is reportedly occurring quite rapid such as
two events occur in April 2002 and October in Kuala Lumpur which has been recognised
due to uncontrolled development and activities within the catchment and flood plain.
At present the development of flood risk map is a difficult process since the information in
the flood plain i.e. ground data and the infrastructure is not readily available. This paper
present the development of flood risk maps with the support of GIS tools for Sg. Selangor
basin and evaluate the impact that might arise due to human activities in the catchment

2 Flood Mitigation strategies

Two common approaches to solve flood problem that has been recognized are structural
and non structural measure. Structural measure such as river widening, deepening and
straightening is targeting to reduce flood magnitude but at the same time might transfer the
flood problem to the downstream. For non structural measures, tools such as computer
model can be used to quantify the effects of human interference to the river system. Such
tools already available in advanced country but the application is still new in this country. It
is important to carry out thorough analysis to understand the flood behaviour before any
structural measures are carried out. Therefore, before any activities are implemented within
the catchment and the flood plain, river engineers able to evaluate potential impact of flood
extent and advice the implementing agencies to carry out further prevention measure to
avoid the anticipate problem that might occur.

Figure 1 Flood Prone Areas in Malaysia

3 Objective of the study
• The main purpose of the study is to develop a complete river model consisting of
hydrological, hydraulic, 3D ground model including various GIS layers covering main
river system and flood plain.
• The model will generate a flood risk map base on various return period and provide
quick results on flood impact due to probable human activities within a catchment.

4 Sg. Selangor Basin

Sg. Selangor is located at northern part of the state of Selangor. The catchment is
approximately 1960km2 which cover about a quarter of the state of Selangor. The main
river, Sg. Selangor starts from the west of Titiwangsa Range at elevation about 1700m
between the borders of state of Pahang. It flows approximately 110km toward the
southwest to the Straits Of Melaka. The major tributaries which joint the river are Sg.
Kerling, Sg. Kubu, Sg. Rening, Sg. Batang Kali, Sg. Buloh, Sg. Sembah. Figure 2 shows
the main river and the subcatchment.

On the east of the basin is a mountainous area mainly covered with forest and plantation
while the west side are generally swamp and flat with paddy as the main agriculture
activities. The most recent landuse map for the catchments is shown in Figure 3

Sg. Selangor was selected for this study because of availability of river survey data together
with the ground elevation of the flood plain within 500m to 2km at each side of the river.
Concurrently, due to its location, it is a potential area to be developed since the adjacent
Klang Valley development is almost reaching saturation level in the near future.

5 River and flood plain hydrodynamic model development

The process to develop the river and flood plain model consists of 3 main components i.e
hydrologic rainfall-runoff model, hydrodynamic model and 3D ground model. The main
software use in the hydraulic analysis is InfoWorks RS (River Simulation) developed by
Wallingford Software, UK and Arc View + 3D Analyst. The hydrodynamic model can
represent the flood plain using extended section, reservoir or separate river section. For the
flood delineation, InfoWorks RS combine water level from the hydraulic computation with
the 3D (Shape File) to produce the extent of flooding.
Flow from sub catchments to the main river are represented by rainfall runoff model based
on US SCS method. The river model cover 110 km by cross sections at 1km apart which
started at the new ‘SPLASH’ dam down to the river mouth. The river section was extended
to the flood plain based on conditions below:
• Normal extent up to expected flood level if the ground has smooth / gradual change
of elevation
• Use of pond / reservoir where the ground is interrupted by bund or road
• Pond / reservoirs are connected to river section or other reservoir using spill unit
where spill elevation is based on the bund or road level.

6 GIS application

Due to large amount is required for the input to the hydrologic and hydraulic model, most of the
processes were carried out using GIS tools. Most of the GIS analysis was carried using Arcview
3.1 and PC Arc Info Ver 4 developed by ESRI US.

6.1 Data collection

The study is carry out for a large catchment and long river reach. The main factor to make
the study successful is the availability of information and data. Tremendous effort was
employed to process all important data. Table below listed the most critical information
required for the analysis

Table 1. List of critical information in the catchment

Type Source Scale

Hydrological data
Rainfall data DID 1:50,000

Water level data DID

Flow data DID

Land use data DOA 1:500000

Soil type data DOA 1:500000

Hydraulic data DID

River cross section DID 1:200

Structure information DID 1:200

Tidal data JUPEM, NAVY

Ground data
3-D flood plain terrain data DID 1:5000

Note
DID - Department of Irrigation and Drainage
DOA – Department of Agriculture
JUPEM – Department of Land and Survey

6.2 Rainfall runoff modelling

The main input to the rainfall runoff model area the subcatchment area, river gradient,
landuse, soil type and rainfall distribution. Most of this data can be extracted from JUPEM
topographical map and DID hydrological station. Various GIS analysis was carried out to
determine the information which will be illustrate below
6.2.a Division of subcatchment
Various methods to delineate the subcahchment are available but for this exercise the
subcatchemnt boundary was digitize manually from contour and river layer using Arc View.
This manual process was selected since the contour interval was every 20m and
downstream part of the basin was very flat and not much ground information is available.
The division of subcatchment is shown in Fig 2.

6.2.b River slope

The river slope was estimated using a simple approach which is the different of height
divide by the length of the river. Both of this information is available form the contour layer
and the river layer.

6.2.c Soil distribution

The rainfall runoff model (SCS Method) requires the soil group to be defined by the Curve
No (CN) for each subcatchent. Value for CN base on landuse is available from many
references. This information was then combined to the Landuse layer from Department of
Agriculture using Join Table technique. Overlaying process using ‘Union’ was carried out to
distribute the soil group to various subcatchment. Average CN for each subcatchment was
derived from areal weighted using overlay technique.

6.2.d Rainfall area distribution

Rainfall runoff model requires an areal rainfall data. However DID only provide point rainfall
from 15 hydrological stations within the basin. Theisen polygon technique was used to
convert the point rainfall to areal rainfall. It is then redistribute to the various subcatchment
using overlay process. Thiessen's Polygon map is shown in Fig 4,

6.3 River cross section

The main input for the hydraulic model is the river cross section and flood plain. The cross
section survey was done at 1km interval which extent up to 1km each side of the river bank.
Therefore about 100 cross section was require for the data input involving the coordinate
longitude latitude and the ground value. Experience shows that using manual input, the
process will requires about 2 months to complete.
The cross section data which is available in 3D point in AutoCad was then converted to 3D
ground model using Arc View 3D Analyst and development of river hydrodynamic model
was completed within one week. The model is shown in Fig 5 and 6.

6.4 Ground model development

InfoWorks RS combine the hydraulic model and the ground model during the hydraulic
simulation process to delineate the flood extent. The quality and the accuracy of the flood
extent depend on the quality of the ground model. The ground model was developed from
the contour map, the survey data and spot height in the flood plain. The contour interval
from JUPEM is at 20m interval while the survey contour was 5m interval. Spot height is
available in the flood plain at spacing of 200m. The bed level along centre line of the river
was extracted from the cross-section survey. Elevation of infrastructures such as road and
bund in the flood plain are partly available and treated as a hard break line in ArcView 3D
Analyst during triangulation process. The information above especially the contour can be
considered good for the upstream steep stretch but does not produced a good 3D ground
model at the lower part of the river system where the flood plain is more flatter and consist
many infrastructures such as roads and bunds.. The ground model was further improved
 using Kriging method in Surfer 8.0 which produce grid at 10 – 30 m spacing. The final
ground model for the whole river system is about 700Mbyte which consume a high
percentage of memory during simulation. For the purpose of the study, only middle part of
the river system was used which about 200mbyte. The 3D TIN then exported to 3D shp file
using Tin exporter to InfoWorks RS. ArcView 3D Analyst. The ground model in InfoWorks
RS is shown in Fig 7.

7 Simulation and generation of flood map.

For the purpose of this paper, simulations were carried for the 1971 flood which took about
1½ hour to complete. The flood map from the hydraulic analysis was exported to Arc View
and refine to produce flood depth polygon at varous location as shown in Fig 8. Using
overlay process between flood map and landuse, flood for different landuse can be produce
to estimate the damage for different landuse.

8 Conclusion
The study has shown that automatic flood map delineation can be produce for big river
system in short time with the support of GIS tools. The processes include development of
hydrological, hydraulic and ground model. Besides good hydraulic model, the quality of the
flood extent very much depends on the quality of the ground model which requires proper
triangulation process.
For the case of Sg. Selangor which covers a distance of 110 km and total catchment area
of 1960 km2, the ground model was developed at a very fine 10m grid which causes the file
size to be about 700Mbyte. The simulation process for 5 days duration took about 40-60
minutes to complete on Pentium IV. The processing time will definitely can be reduced with
the development of new high speed computer in the future. With this development, flood
risk map can be a quick decision support system tool to study the impact of either plan or
unplanned human activities at catchment area of a river system.
.

References

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 Appendix

Figure 2. Location map of study area

Sembah Catchmnet

Figure 3. Land use map of Sg. Selangor

Figure 4: Theissen Polygon from available stations

Figure 5: Model network for the whole catchment

Fig 6: Sample of river cross section from the model

Figure 7: Model covering river and flood plain – InfoWorks RS

Fig. 8. Flood map with different flood depth after processed in Arc View