Flood risk assessment using regional regression analysis

This study aimed to create a flood risk map for ungauged regions, which have limited flood damage data and other relevant data. The fact that there is a shortage of data that are critical for the establishment of a flood assessment and mitigation plan is not surprising even in developed countries like South Korea. To address this problem, the regional regression concept in statistical hydrology was introduced to the flood risk assessment field in this study, and it was framed with a series of two regression functions: flood damage and regional coefficients. As the second regression function utilizes the local socioeconomic variables, the resulting flood risk map can reflect the spatial characteristics well. The proposed methodology was applied to create flood risk maps for the three metropolitan areas in South Korea. The comparison of the proposed methodology with the existing methods revealed that only the proposed methodology can produce a statistically meaningful flood risk map based on a recent major flood in 2001.