摘要
The study identified spatial variations in flood vulnerability levels in Port Harcourt metropolis with the use of GIS （geographic information systems）. This study considered four factors and these included landuse types, drainage, residential densities and elevation. The elevation data and drainage data were derived from the topographical map of scale 1：35,000, while the land use types were derived from the imagery of Port Harcourt metropolis downloaded from Google Earth, 2010 version. Both the topographical map and imagery were geo-referenced to geographic coordinates and geographic features were digitized in form of shapefiles using both ArcView GIS 3.3 and ArcGIS 9.2 versions. AHP （analytical hierarchical process） was adopted in this study whereby many flood factors were ranked and overlaid for decision making. The contour data was used to generate the DEM （digital elevation model） through the process called kriging in ArcGIS 9.2. Based on the ranking index, factors considered were reclassified to three levels of vulnerability namely highly vulnerable, moderately vulnerable and lowly vulnerable through ranking method and these reclassified factors were then overlaid using an addition operator. The analysis shows that communities like Eagle Island, Ojimbo, Kidney Island were highly vulnerable to flood while communities like Choba, Ogbogoro, Rumualogu were moderately vulnerable. Communities like Rumuigbo, Rumuodomaya etc. were lowly vulnerable to flood. The highly vulnerable places covered 98.18 km2, moderately vulnerable was 220.46 km2 and lowly vulnerable areas covered 330.77 km2.
