A tool to automate the process of flood risk areas detection due to climate change

Flooding is a major hazard in the world, with increase in climate change its occurrence has also accelerated over the years. Recent major floods especially in the coastal areas that are associated with increase in sea level rise and storm surge have created a major need for predicting, monitoring and planning for future flood occurrence. Inundation affects and vulnerability of the coastal areas need to be accessed. Using Spatial Information Science knowledge and using tools GIS software packages like ArcGIS, GRASS, QGIS and so many others has made the exposure of ecosystem services, population, and environmental hazards location easier within the different years. But these software packages come with a lot of sophisticated methodologies and many processes to delineate the flood plain thus raise the concern of automating the process. This thesis presents a GIS-bases toolbox that was written in python scripting language to automate the process of detecting flood risk areas due to climate change. The toolbox takes the advantages of the python scripting by using the Arcpy library which allows the direct access to methodologies that are used in ArcMap (ESRI) software.