Flood damage assessment integrating geospatial technologies. a case study in Hue, Viet Nam Paper 5-4-2 FLOOD DAMAGE ASSESSMENT INTEGRATING GEOSPATIAL TECHNOLOGIES. A CASE STUDY IN HUE, VIET NAM DINH NGOC DAT, J. S. M. FOWZE, NGUYEN DUONG ANH, MANZUL K. HAZARIKA AND LAL SAMARAKOON GeoInformatics Centre of Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Pathumthani, Thailand ABSTRACT Viet Nam which has more than 3,000 km of coastal line is received with many tropical storms from East Sea every year. Storms of destructive nature causing considerable damage, generally, strike the central part of Viet Nam; namely three provinces, HaTinh, Thua Thien Hue and QuangNam. The 1999 event has been the worst as regards to storms and associated flooding in Viet Nam causing significant damages. Particularly, in Hue, since 1999, hundreds of people have lost their lives and the property damage comes amounts to thousands of billions Viet Nam dong. With climate change scenarios, it is anticipated that similar events of low frequency could revisit the country with devastating effects. Having identified the effectiveness of the modern day geospatial technologies such as remote sensing, GIS, and GPS, in hazard, vulnerability and risk analyses as well as risk management, it is aimed to delineate the flooding extents and map the elements at risk towards increased awareness, preparedness and sustainable development. With their proven advantage on the detection of water bodies, RADAR satellite imageries acquired during the 1999 extreme event and images of the same kind acquired during dry seasons were made use of to extract the flood area extent by both Red-Green-Blue composition and image classification after filtering speckle noise and image enhancement. Multi spectral optical satellite imageries were used for land cover and land use classification by the supervised classified technique. A field visit was made in this conjunction for observing the ground truth. Finally, a GIS analysis was carried out for a quantitative analysis and assessment of damage. Damage curve models corresponding to the identified land use land cover classes were assumed for the purpose. Attributing total damage costs for the different land cover land use classes the total damage was arrived at, demonstrating a methodology for assessing the flood damage with the integration of geospatial technologies and tools. INTRODUCTION The flooding event which affected Viet Nam in late 1999 has been recorded as the worst flooding event the country had experienced in a century. The floods were caused by a series of storms that brought heavy rain to the central part of the country in October and November. The first storm to hit was Tropical Storm Eve on October 19 and the main event occurred from November 1 - 6. In total 793 people lost their lives and 55,000 were made homeless. The floods brought US$ 290 million of damage to the region and caused a further US$ 490 million of economic losses. It is estimated that 1.7 million people in the central Provinces of Viet Nam were affected by the floods. Important is the fact that Viet Nam gets lashed by typhoons and tropical storms every year, mostly along the central coast. Further, unprecedented occurrences of rainfall events linked with climate and which led to flooding have also been reported in the recent past resulting in loss of life and considerable damage to property. These indicate the need for efforts 1