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Flood Hazard Mapping is a vital component for appropriate land use planning in flood-prone areas. It creates easily-read, rapidly-accessible charts and maps which facilitates the administrators and planners to identify areas of risk and prioritize their mitigation/ response efforts. This article presents an efficient methodology to accurately delineate the flood-hazard areas in the Kosi River Basin, North Bihar, India in a GIS environment.
The world’s climate has been warming for more than a hundred years: there have been fluctuations, notably cooling phases in the 1960s and 1970s, although long-term records indicate an accelerating warming trend from about 1980. Although this has influenced ecosystems worldwide, its effects on glaciers and the duration of winter snow cover have been particularly noticeable, especially in the European Alps and Greenland, and on the reduction of sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean. The Hindu Kush-Himalayan region has been no exception.
This report contains an assessment of the threat facing the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region from the recent (post-1950s) and rapid formation of meltwater lakes on the surface or at the end of a large number of the region & glaciers. There is no doubt that the driving force is the current climate warming. Individual case studies of the catastrophic outburst (glacial lake outburst floods or GLOFs) from such glacial lakes are introduced.
