Journal of Hydrology 591 (2020) 125552

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Journal of Hydrology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhydrol

Research papers

Convolutional neural network approach for spatial prediction of flood T

hazard at national scale of Iran
Khabat Khosravia, Mahdi Panahib,c, Ali Golkariand, Saskia D. Keesstrae,f, Patricia M. Sacof,
Dieu Tien Buig, , Saro Leeb,h,
⁎ ⁎

a
Department of Watershed Management Engineering, Sari Agricultural Science and Natural Resources University, Sari, Iran
b
Geoscience Platform Division, Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM), 124, Gwahak-ro Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 34132, South Korea
c
Division of Science Education, Kangwon National University, College of Education, # 4-301, Gangwondaehak-gil, Chuncheon-si, Gangwon do 24341, South Korea
d
Department of Watershed Management, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
e
Team Soil, Water and Land Use, Wageningen Environmental Research, Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, Netherlands
f
Civil, Surveying and Environmental Engineering and Centre for Water Security and Environmental Sustainability, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan 2308, Australia
g
Institute of Research and Development, Duy Tan University, Da Nang 550000, Viet Nam
h
Department of Geophysical Exploration, Korea University of Science and Technology, 217 Gajeong-ro Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 34113, South Korea

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

This manuscript was handled by Emmanouil Iran experiences frequent destructive floods with significant socioeconomic consequences. Quantifying the ac­
Anagnostou, Editor-in-Chief curate impacts of such natural hazards, however, is a complicated task. The present study uses a deep learning
convolutional neural networks (CNN) algorithm, which is among the newer and most powerful algorithms in big
Keywords:
Flood control data sets, to develop a flood susceptibility map for Iran. A total of 2769 records were collected from flood
Hazard locations across the entire country; we divided this data set into two groups using a cross-validation technique.
Iran The first group, used as a training data set, was constructed from 70% of the data set and was used for model
Deep-learning building. The second group, used as a testing data set, was constructed from the remaining 30% of the records
and used for validation. Ten flood conditioning factors, slope, altitude, aspect, plan curvature, profile curvature,
rainfall, geology, land use, distance from roads, and distance from rivers, were identified and used in the
modeling process. The area under the prediction-rate curve was used for model evaluation, with results showing
that the flood susceptibility map has an acceptable accuracy of 75%. The results also indicated that approxi­
mately 12% and 3% of the country are highly and very highly susceptible to future flooding events, respectively.
Moreover, 29% and 49% of Iran’s cities are located in areas with high and very high susceptibility to future
flooding hazards. The most effective approaches to flood mitigation are preventing urban expansion and new
construction in highly to very highly flood-prone areas as well as watershed management plans and constructing
flood control structures according to the topographical characteristics of the catchment.

1. Introduction
Floods are among the most destructive natural hazards in tropical
areas that experience high rainfall, in particular during monsoon per­
iods, and in dry and semi-dry regions (as flash floods). Flooding can
cause irreparable and immeasurable damage that may be categorized as
tangible or intangible. Tangible damage, which includes destruction to
buildings, agriculture, road and transportation systems, infrastructure,
environmental ecosystems, humans, and property, imposes a major
negative emotional burden on the society in question (Khosravi et al.,
2016a, 2016b; Termeh et al., 2018; Tiryaki and Karaca, 2018).
Floods affect 75 million people on average annually worldwide
(around 20,000 casualties per year), with economic losses of $95 billion
(Chapi et al., 2017; Khosravi et al., 2018b). Recently, the frequency of
flooding has increased by more than 40% (Hirabayashi et al., 2013)
because climate change has significantly influenced the intensity, pat­
tern, and magnitude of flooding (Chapi et al., 2017; Hens et al., 2018;
Van Thanh et al., 2017). Asian countries, in particular, are hotspots,
with relatively high exposure to flooding and earthquakes. In Asia,
more than 90% of human losses resulting from natural disasters are

Corresponding authors at: Geoscience Platform Division, Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM), 124, Gwahak-ro Yuseong-gu, Daejeon
⁎

34132, South Korea (S. Lee).

E-mail addresses: mahdi.panahi@kigam.re.kr (M. Panahi), golkarian@um.ac.ir (A. Golkarian), saskia.keesstra@wur.nl (S.D. Keesstra),
Patricia.Saco@newcastle.edu.au (P.M. Saco), buitiendieu@duytan.edu.vn (D.T. Bui), leesaro@kigam.re.kr (S. Lee).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2020.125552
Received 23 March 2020; Received in revised form 11 August 2020; Accepted 15 September 2020
Available online 20 September 2020
0022-1694/ © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
K. Khosravi, et al.
Fig. 1. Photos of flood damage in a different part of Iran in 2019.
attributable to flooding (Smith, 2003). Flooding results from the direct
impact of both natural and anthropogenic factors (Chang and Chen,
2016). Iran has recently experienced disastrous floods that, in addition
to the impact of climate change, can be attributed to poor watershed
management (e.g., deforestation, overgrazing, lack of flood control
measures; (Khosravi et al., 2016a). Recent flooding events in Iran and
their record casualties have affected 25 of the country’s 31 provinces,
resulting in more than 77 human casualties and USD $2.2 billion worth
of damage to public and private assets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
2019_Iran_floods). Some real-photo of the flooding events in a different
part of the country is presented in Fig. 1. Furthermore, at the time of
this writing, a vast region in southern and southeastern Iran (including
Sistan & Baluchistan) is facing unprecedented floods.
Although flooding hazards are inevitable and largely beyond human
control, flood risk management practices can mitigate the impact of
flooding through hazard prediction and vulnerability reduction.
Identifying areas prone to flooding can inform threatened communities
and decision-makers at different levels to avoid catastrophes and
therefore is key to flood risk management (Bui et al., 2018; Choubin
et al., 2019; Kourgialas and Karatzas, 2011; Sarhadi et al., 2012;
Tehrany et al., 2013; Tien Bui et al., 2018). Flooding, a complex phe­
nomenon resulting from watershed management and hydrological,
meteorological, geomorphological, and geological conditions, is a so­
phisticated and non-linear process and thus cannot be easily predicted
with simple linear models (Pappenberger et al., 2006). Numerical
models, such as the Hydrologic Engineering Center’s (CEIWR-HEC)
River Analysis System (HEC-RAS), offer some advantages, such as the
calculation of discharge in any cross-section, flow depth, or velocity, in
particular concerning inundation maps (two- or three-dimensional) and
are appropriate modeling flood challenges. However, the large amounts
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Journal of Hydrology 591 (2020) 125552
of data that they require for modeling and calibration are unavailable in
many developing countries. These models are also computationally
demanding and time-consuming, in particular in large areas (i.e., gen­
erating a large-scale flood map, such as for an entire country, is diffi­
cult). In general, two- or three-dimensional flood modeling is unviable
for areas larger than 1000 km2, in particular, when high resolution is
required (Teng et al., 2017). Several powerful physically-based models
(hydrographs) have been developed to predict flood discharge (e.g.,
SWAT, HEC-HMS). Although these models are robust, well known, and
developed according to the relevant catchments’ rainfall-runoff pro­
cesses, they still have several shortcomings for generating flood maps
and identifying inundation areas (Sahoo et al., 2009). Consequently,
researchers are keen to identify alternative robust, and flexible models
to remedy these weaknesses.
Recently, the use of geographic information systems (GIS) and re­
mote sensing (RS) has brought new insights to the field of hydrology
and multidimensional phenomena—in particular, flood modeling—to
address the weaknesses of the models above. GIS is a useful geostatis­
tical tool that can handle large amounts of data of different scales and
from different sources for (flood) map generation. Several researchers
have integrated various data-driven (bivariate and multivariate) and
multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) algorithms with GIS and RS for
flood susceptibility mapping (FSM), including frequency ratio (Khosravi
et al., 2016a; Lee et al., 2012; Tehrany et al., 2013), weights of evidence
(Rahmati et al., 2016), evidential belief function (Tien Bui et al., 2019),
Shannon entropy (Haghizadeh et al., 2017), analytic hierarchy process
(AHP) (Chen et al., 2011; Das, 2019), analytic network process (ANP)
(Dano et al., 2019; de Brito and Evers, 2016), the decision-making trial
and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) (Azareh et al., 2019), Technique
for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) (Khosravi
K. Khosravi, et al.
et al., 2019), and logistic regression (LR) (Youssef et al., 2015). Al­
though bivariate statistical models have simple structures and are easy
to interpret, as a result of this simplicity, they are not sufficiently ac­
curate for predicting complex phenomena, such as flood occurrences.
Furthermore, the MCDM technique, as a subjectivity model, is wea­
kened by its reliance on expert opinion as an essential input, which
often introduces bias (Khosravi et al., 2018b, 2019). Thus, machine
learning algorithms were developed to address these weaknesses. These
include artificial neural networks (ANN) (Falah et al., 2019; Kia et al.,
2012), support vector machines (SVM) (Kavzoglu et al., 2014), random
forests (Chapi et al., 2017), logistic model trees (Pham et al., 2018),
naïve Bayes trees (Khosravi et al., 2019) and multivariate adaptive
regression splines (MARS) (Dodangeh et al., 2020). Each of these al­
gorithms has several drawbacks. The use of SVM has declined as a result
of the numerous parameters in its structure, for each of which optimum
values must be determined, and the need to determine the most effec­
tive kernel functions in its structure. Although the decision tree (DT)
algorithm offers reasonable precision in FSM (Tehrany et al., 2013), it
has some problems for defining rules for performance. In DT, multiple
output attributes are not allowed, and trees are sensitive to noisy data
(Tien Bui et al., 2012). Another weakness of DT is that this model may
produce a large tree structure, which makes interpretation difficult, and
misclassification of data may occur during the machine learning process
(Tehrany et al., 2013). ANN, the most widely used algorithm, also
suffers from several drawbacks that result in its poor prediction capa­
city. Therefore, ANN was integrated with fuzzy logic, and the adaptive
neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) was developed. Although the
ANFIS is a powerful model, it struggles to accurately determine the
weights of membership functions in fuzzy rules. Some researchers have
integrated different optimization algorithms with the ANFIS model to
address this weakness with respect to different aspects of hydrology,
such as FSM (Bui et al., 2018, 2016; Khosravi et al., 2018a; Tien Bui
et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2019), groundwater potential mapping (Chen
et al., 2019; Khosravi et al., 2018a; Termeh et al., 2018), and landslide
susceptibility mapping (Chen et al., 2017), but this successive integra­
tion of the ANFIS model with optimization algorithms is complex and
has decreased its use. Deep learning algorithms have recently gained
superiority over traditional machine learning models by virtue of their
greater flexibility and predictive accuracy, in particular for big data,
and incremental approaches have been used to learn high-level com­
ponents from the data sets used (Ghorbanzadeh et al., 2019). Deep
learning algorithms outperform all other traditional machine learning
algorithms when a data set is particularly large and the problem under
investigation has a complex process (Panahi et al., 2020). A convolu­
tional neural network (CNN), an automatic tool, is the most popular
deep learning algorithm which is proper for spatial data, like present
study. This algorithm sets the features as input and can be described as
a tensor with which local components are inter-correlated. Convolu­
tional layer in CNN algorithm can simultaneously learn the connection
between features and this would result to achieve higher performance.
Also CNN use minimal amount of preprocessing.
In this paper, we propose a framework with a robust deep learning
algorithm that helps to generate flood susceptibility maps. This fra­
mework was used to generate maps for Iran and draw conclusions re­
garding the spatial distribution of susceptibility and its potential dri­
vers.
1.1. Study area
Iran is a Middle Eastern country with a population of 82 million and
an area of 1,648,195 km2. Iran lies between longitude 44° and 63° 5′
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Journal of Hydrology 591 (2020) 125552
30″ E and latitude 25° and 40° N. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to
the west and by Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea, and
Turkmenistan to the north. Afghanistan and Pakistan border Iran to the
east, with the Persian Gulf and the Oman Sea to the south (Fig. 2).
Almost 50% of Iran consists of mountains; fertile plains account for
25%, and the remaining 25% is desert (Dehnavi et al., 2015). The slope
angle ranges from 0° to 76.28°, and the altitude ranges from 500 to
5597 m above sea level. The country’s two main mountains are Zagros
in the west and Alborz in the north. Iran’s climate is unique by virtue of
the difference between the warmest and coldest temperatures in winter,
which can sometimes be more than 50 °C. Iran is located in an arid/
semi-arid region with annual average precipitation close to 200 mm
and significant spatial variability, from 15 mm/year in the central de­
serts up to 2000 mm/year in the north. The spatial variability in pre­
cipitation and temperature has a significant impact on the vegetation
cover. In terms of its geomorphological characteristics, Iran is divided
into the different regions of Caspian, Zagros, the central plateau, and
southern coastal plains (Ghorbani, 2013). Political boundaries divide it
into 31 provinces and 1243 large cities, 339 of which have popula­
tions > 20,000.
2. Methodology
A diagram of the conceptual modeling methodology adopted in the
current study is presented in Fig. 3.
2.1. Flood inventory mapping
The first step in the flood modeling and mapping process is to
compile historical flood data and to determine flood conditioning fac­
tors as well as the spatial relationships between these factors and
flooded locations to understand the dynamics of flooding in the area of
interest. A total of 2769 historical flood records collected by Iran’s
Water Resources Management Company (IWRMC) were used for
modeling. These locations were ultimately converted into several points
and then precisely located in polygonal format.
2.2. Preparation and selection of flood conditioning factors
In the first stage of modeling, ten flood conditioning factors were
considered based on the literature (Khosravi et al., 2016b; Tehrany
et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2019), catchment characteristics and data
availability. These factors were slope, altitude, aspect, plan curvature,
profile curvature, rainfall, geology, land use, distance from roads, and
distance from rivers (Bui et al., 2018, 2016; Khosravi et al., 2016a,
2018b, 2016b, 2019; Tehrany et al., 2013; Tien Bui et al., 2018, 2019).
We implemented a widely used approach, the information gain ratio
(IGR) technique, to distinguish between variables with a significant
impact on the accuracy of estimation and noise-creating variables with
negative effects on the outcome (Table 2).
Slope, altitude, aspect, plan curvature, and profile curvature were
constructed from topographic maps obtained from the National
Cartographic Center of Iran (NCC), with a spatial resolution of
30 × 30 m. Distance from rivers and road were computed with data
from Iranian rivers and roads (a shapefile provided by IWRMC) and
using the multiple ring buffer tool in ArcGIS 10.2. The geological map
of Iran was acquired from Geological Survey & Mineral Explorations of
Iran (GSI). The rainfall map used in this study was constructed by Iran’s
Meteorological Organization (IMO) using long-term rainfall data
(30 years of mean annual rainfall). Landuse map was obtained (as a
shapefile) from the Iranian Agricultural Scientific Ministry (Table 1).
K. Khosravi, et al. Journal of Hydrology 591 (2020) 125552

Fig. 2. Study area and flood inventory map.

Fig. 3. Flowchart of the methodology adopted in the present study.

Table 1
Input variables description.
Conditioning factor Source Spatial resolution Importance

Aspect DEM 30 m × 30 m Different amount of soil moisture due to different solar radiation and vegetation cover
Slope DEM 30 m × 30 m Infiltration process and runoff generation
Plan and profile curvature DEM 30 m × 30 m Erosion process and control surface runoff
Altitude DEM 30 m × 30 m Has effect on rainfall and vegetation cover as well as soil depth and texture and finally runoff generation
Rainfall National map 30 m × 30 m Affects runoff generation
Distance from roads National map 1:25,000 Cutting the slope hill, river, forest and etc. through hydraulic structures (culverts, bridges). Sometimes is a
manmade cause of flooding.
Distance from rivers National map 1:100,000 Effect on the soil moisture as well as water level increases and extended from rivers to floodplain and cause
flooding.
Geology National map 1:100,000 Different formations have a different structures and permeability.
Land-use National map 1:25,000 Different land-use and vegetation covers affect infiltration rates (and runoff generation).

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Fig. 4. Structure of the deep CNN algorithm.

Table 2 All the input maps and their classes are presented in Fig. A1 in the
Parameter settings for the CNN. Appendix.
Parameter Search space Final settings
2.3. Building of the training and testing data sets
Convolutional kernel size None 10 × 1
Number of convolution unit 100
Max pooling kernel size 3×1 The final step in FSM by artificial intelligence algorithms involves
Number of epochs 90 binary classification, with two classes of flood and non-flood locations.
Activation function ReLU Consequently, ArcGIS10.2 was used to identify 2769 non-flood loca­
Optimizer Adamax tions in places such as areas which are never inundated during flood
Learning rate 0.001
events (one of the most obvious examples is hilly or mountainous areas)
Initial learning rate 0.1
Dropout rate 0.5 (all non-flood locations presented in Fig. B1 in the Appendix). Flood
Weight decay 0.0001 and non-flood locations were assigned values of 1 and 0, respectively,
and were overlaid with the 10 flood conditioning factors. Finally, the
required information (i.e., flood position, located in which class of each
Table 3 flood conditioning factor) was extracted and converted into an Excel
Networks’s accuracy without using a dropout layer to avoid the over-fitting file. All information extracted with respect to flood and non-flood lo­
problem. cations was divided into two groups by a cross-validation technique at a
SSE MSE RMSE MAE r ratio of 70:30, the most commonly used ratio in spatial modeling of
natural hazards (Tehrany et al., 2014, 2015). The first portion was used
Training 34.031 0.009 0.098 0.040 0.982
for training (the training data set) and was constructed from 70% of
Testing 14.941 0.009 0.094 0.040 0.983
flood and non-flood locations for model building, and the second por­
*Sum of squared errors (SSE), mean square error (MSE), root mean square error tion (the testing data set) was used for model validation and was con­
(RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE) and correlation coefficient (r). structed from the remaining 30% of flood and non-flood locations
(Chung and Fabbri, 2003).
Table 4
Networks’s accuracy after using dropout layer to avoid the over-fitting problem. 3. Model description
SSE MSE RMSE MAE r
3.1. Convolutional neural networks (CNN)
Training 28.421 0.008 0.090 0.032 0.984
Testing 14.805 0.008 0.094 0.033 0.098
To overcome the challenge of decreased speed in the learning pro­
cess faced by traditional artificial neural networks (ANN) in analyzing
complex networks (Lu et al., 2017), Bengio proposed the convolutional
neural network (CNN), which is a neural network that carries out local
connections among layers (LeCun et al., 1998; Lu et al., 2017). CNN has
different neuronal layers. The first layer extracts features from an input
image as well as retains connections between pixels by understanding
image features that use small squares of input data. This layer is called
the convolution layer. The convolution layer is a mathematical opera­
tion base and requires two inputs—an image matrix and a filter or
kernel—to be run. The second layer is the activation layer, which
usually appears after the convolutional layer if it is non-linear. How­
ever, a rectified linear unit (ReLU) function is the most effective and
typical activation function and is always zeros and ones. The third
layer, or the pooling layer, preserves the most critical information while
reducing the number of parameters, in particular when images are very
large. Spatial pooling has different types, such as Max, Average, Sum,
and so forth. The last layer is the actual component and performs dis­
criminative learning in a deep neural network. This fully connected
Fig 5. Convergence plot of the models.

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K. Khosravi, et al. Journal of Hydrology 591 (2020) 125552

Table 5
Importance of flood conditioning factors using the information gain ratio technique.
Factors Land-use aspect altitude Plan curvature Distance from river rainfall Slope Distance from road Profile curvature geology

IGR value 0.60 0.40 0.37 0.35 0.33 0.30 0.29 0.28 0.27 0.08

Fig. 6. Flood susceptibility map of Iran. The numbers correspond to the different provinces as listed in Fig. 7.

Fig. 7. Percentages of flood-prone areas in each province.

layer is a simple and multilayer perceptron that can learn weights and
identify object classes. Based on the type of data, images, and goals,
scientists have proposed different structures for their research, in­
cluding ZFNet, VGGNet, GoogleNet, ResNet, LeNet-5, and AlexNet
(Fang et al., 2019). Geoscience researchers have achieved and reported
notable results using CNN-2D, and thus this structure was used in this
study (Wang et al., 2019). Moreover, because CNN input data must take
the form of images, and the input data are one-dimensional, the pri­
mary data must be converted into images.
To initialize FSM, a one-dimensional input grid cell that consists of

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Fig. 8. The locations of cities (indicated by

dots) considered in this study. The color of
the dot indicates the class of flood suscept­
ibility. The chart on the right shows the
percentage of cities exposed to varying de­
grees of flood hazard. (For interpretation of
the references to colour in this figure legend,
the reader is referred to the web version of
this article.)

Fig. 9. Percentage of flood exposure in each province by city.

Fig. 10. Images showing the construction of a flood wall by locals.

7
K. Khosravi, et al.
Fig. 11. Images of flooded cities close to large rivers: (a) Ahvaz in the Khozestan province and (b) Agh-Ghala in the Golestan province.
different attribute features must be converted into a two-dimensional
matrix. Because none of the data are classified and are constant, the
images created are very large.
The network used has a convolutional layer with 100 filters at the
beginning, and in most cases, these layers are used for those data that
have more correlation with adjacent features. Inherently these kinds of
cases are applied for the data-like image. However, it is not useful for
the features used in this article. In order for the network to be able to
learn the correlation between features simultaneously during the
learning process, the filter size considered should be 10 × 1. This en­
ables the filter to consider all features and their correlations, to extract
the correlation features. This layer uses the activation function ReLU.
The next layer used is the normalization layer that accelerates the
learning process. In the following, a dropout layer with 50% rate is
used. This layer transforms 50% of the output from pre-layer to 0 values
in each learning iteration so that the next layer does not overfit learning
inputs, and enable the learning of different aspects of the data. The next
layer is the average pooling layer with filter size 3 × 1 that reduces its
dimension by a half. This layer dramatically reduces the weight of the
network and highly decreases its computational load during the
learning process.
The following layer is fully connected, it has five neurons and its
activation function is a ReLU like convolutional layer. Finally, the last
layers are also fully connected with one neuron and one regression
layer that produces the final output. The CNN structure and its para­
meters are presented in Fig. 4 and Table 2.
There are several different approaches developed to avoid over-fit­
ting, (Srivastava et al., 2014). The first method is to use a set of data
validation (10% of train data) to check the method’s accuracy after
training, which not only adjusts network parameters but also helps to
avoid over-fitting by comparing the network accuracy of data and
training data. The second approach is applying a Dropout layer after
each convolutional layer, which deletes 50% of its input layers after
every iteration in order for the network to learn all aspects of the given
dataset as well as to avoid over-fitting. The other approach is to use a
relatively small network which would help the network not to be over-
fitted.
Tables 3 and 4 show the network’s accuracy for training and testing
data both with and without using a dropout layer. As can be seen, when
the dropout layer is not used, network accuracy (over-fitting) of
training data is improved. However, for testing data, the difference
between using and not using the dropout layer is quite clear, and it is
clear that not using the dropout layer decrease the network accuracy of
testing data, which means this approach is efficient.
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Journal of Hydrology 591 (2020) 125552
The final approach to avoid over-fitting is by applying L2
Regularization. In this method, Las function is being added to the
second norm of network weight. This would reduce network overfitting.
Additionally, the second norm coefficient of weights (weight decay)
was considered 0.0001. Fig. 5 shows the convergence plot of the
models.
3.2. Flood map generation, validation, and hazard assessment
In the present study, a newly developed artificial intelligence deep
CNN algorithm was used to delineate flood-prone areas. As a first step,
the CNN algorithm was trained (model learning) using a training data
set (i.e., the training data set in Excel format used for model building).
Next, the country of Iran was converted into a raster format. The model
developed was used to predict a flood susceptibility/probability index
for each pixel in the study area (i.e., in this stage, the entire country was
used as a test data set for the built model). Finally, these indices were
divided into different classes of very low, low, moderate, high, and very
high susceptibility to flooding. Different methods may be used for this
classification, but as our predicted indices were skewed, the quantile
method was used (Khosravi et al., 2019). The final step was to evaluate
the resulting map. Therefore, the testing data set was applied in terms
of prediction-rate curves so that the area under the curve (AUC) iden­
tified the model prediction capability quantitatively (Khosravi et al.,
2016a, 2016b). Finally, by overlaying the flood susceptibility map on
the locations of cities in Iran, we identified the number of cities in each
class and used them for further analyses.
4. Results and discussion
The flooding prediction map was evaluated with the testing data set.
The results from this phase show a reasonable and good fit, determined
by an area under the prediction-rate curve (AUC) of 0.75. This means
that the map’s accuracy is around 75% (Khosravi et al., 2019), which is
reliable and acceptable, in particular given the large size of the study
area based on the classification efficiency proposed by Hosmer and
Lemeshow (2000). Model performance can be classified into different
accuracy classes, including 0.5–0.6, 0.6–0.7, 0.7–0.8, 0.8–0.9, and
0.9–1, which correspond to poor, average, good, very good, and ex­
cellent performance, respectively (Yesilnacar, 2005). Given its good
accuracy, this map was used for further analyses.
The results of the information gain ratio method (shown in Table 5)
indicate that the land use factor has the greatest impact on Iran’s flood
occurrences (0.60), followed by aspect (0.40), altitude (0.37), plan
K. Khosravi, et al.
curvature (0.35), distance from rivers (0.33), rainfall (0.30), slope
(0.29), distance from roads (0.278), and geology (0.08). This demon­
strates that all thematic layers considered significantly influence
flooding. By identifying the impact of each factor on flood occurrences,
one can more effectively implement flood control plans and measures.
Visual inspection of the effective flood conditioning factors (i.e., slope,
curvature, rainfall, and altitude maps) (Fig. A1) and the flood sus­
ceptibility map (Fig. 6) clearly reveals that most flood-prone areas are
located in regions where mountain ranges are in close proximity to flat
areas, provided these areas have sufficient rainfall. This observation is
consistent with the nature of the mechanisms that promote flooding. It
is worth mentioning that although these areas are exposed to high flood
hazards, they tend to be densely populated because of their fertile soils,
good weather conditions, and surface water supply, among other fac­
tors. Land use is the factor that most influences flood occurrences be­
cause most of Iran’s land is covered by bare soil that is completely
compacted because of overgrazing and therefore is very effective at
generating runoff. Land use effectiveness, especially plant's role in
runoff generation, is described by (Hou et al., 2020). Although flooding
is linked to rainfall, rainfall is not the main factor predicting flood
susceptibility in Iran, as it is very high in mountainous areas, where
flooding does not occur. Our results are in good agreement with those
of Khosravi et al. (2016a).
Analyses of the flood susceptibility map (Fig. 6) indicate that 3%
and 12% of the entire country have very high and high susceptibility to
future flood occurrences, respectively, corresponding to total areas of
44,943 and 191,107 km2. These areas are distributed in northern and
western Iran (Fig. 6). The Guilan province has the country’s highest
percentage of high and very high flood-prone areas (19.8%), followed
by Mazandaran (17.6%), Golestan (10.1%), Alborz (10.2%), and Kho­
zestan (9.3%), whereas the Yazd province has the lowest percentage
(0.2%; Fig. 7). By contrast, the highest percentage of areas with very
low susceptibility to flooding is found in the Semnan province (51.4%),
followed by Qom (36.4%) and Yazd (33.8%). This can be explained by
the low amount of rainfall in these areas (i.e., deserts with an annual
rainfall of less than 200 mm).
The susceptibility to flooding of a total of 1243 cities was analyzed
in this study, as shown in Fig. 8. Around 29% and 49% of these cities
are located in areas with a high and very high probability of future
flood occurrences, respectively, and only 2% and 6% are located in
areas with very low and low hazards, respectively (Fig. 8). As Fig. 9
illustrates, the Mazandaran province, which has the second-highest
percentage of areas susceptible to flooding, has the highest percentage
of cities (60 out of 67 cities, or 89.6%) exposed to high flood hazards,
followed by Golestan (26 out of 31 cities, 83.9%), Charmahal and
Bakhtiari (24 out of 30 cities, 80%), Lorestan (11 out of 14 cities,
78.6%), Khozestan (47 out of 62 cities, 75.8%), West Azarbayjan (17
out of 24 cities, 70.8%), Hormozgan (17 out of 26 cities, 65.4%), and
Kermanshah (18 out of 28 cities, 64.3). The Kerman province has one of
the lowest percentages of cities exposed to high flood hazards (20.8%),
but it is still not a safe province, as 10 out of 48 cities are in serious
danger of future flooding. Overall, out of the 1243 cities considered,
661 have very high susceptibility to future flooding hazards, 331 have
high susceptibility, 157 have moderate susceptibility, and only 68 and
26 have low and very low susceptibility, respectively. It is startling that
most of these cities were initially built in inappropriate locations and
have since expanded. In the past, the most important criterion for set­
tlement location was the proximity to rivers, but nowadays, because of
rapid changes in climate and anthropogenic disturbance as well as poor
catchment management, proximity to rivers has become one of the
greatest threats to human life. Our findings indicate that Iran faces
serious future flood hazards and that, consequently, flood mitigation
9
Journal of Hydrology 591 (2020) 125552
plans and measures are required immediately. These measures can be
divided into two main groups—structural and nonstructural—or a
combination of both may be more effective (e.g., structural and biolo­
gical). The most important measures are the generation of flood hazard
maps, warning systems, floodwalls, dikes, and detention dams; the
implementation of land use planning strategies; afforestation; and the
planting of appropriate vegetation.
Recent flooding events in Iran in 2019 affected 25 of the country’s
31 provinces, robustly corroborating our findings. The severity of da­
mage was so great that several countries, including France, Germany,
Italy, India, South Korea, Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and Pakistan,
among others, sent humanitarian aid to Iran. Although it has been ar­
gued that most of this damage resulted from the sudden and severe
rainfall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Iran_floods), other stu­
dies suggest that poor management catchment strategies and defor­
estation (Raziei and Zand, 2019), lack of budget for implementing
watershed management plans, and poor crisis management are the
most important factors in Iran’s frequent flood occurrences and its da­
mages. Also Yadollahie (2019) declared that integration of aforemen­
tioned reasons along with global warming is the main cause of recent
flooding.
Heavy rainfall usually occurs during the spring and fall, which are
more likely to produce high runoff, and it is at such times that hy­
drologists and flood experts should implement plans to control future
floods, in particular for floods with high return periods. Flooding may
occur in any region; thus, hydrologists should begin designing and
building flood control structures and applying management measures
according to higher flood return periods. As our results indicate, and in
agreement with well-established theoretical principles on flood pro­
duction, surface water flows from mountain areas tend to concentrate
and produce flooding in the flat areas (valleys) located downstream
(with lower slope and altitude). Even simple, practical measures can
substantially reduce flood hazards and risks. To ensure that these
measures can be implemented, the first step is to identify these flood-
prone areas. The second step is to predict flood depths for different
return periods, which will allow the delineation of critical areas. This
combined information will facilitate the implementation of flood
measure plans according to the predicted flood depths and topo­
graphical characteristics of the relevant area. It is important to note that
different countries opt for different flood risk management portfolios
(Bubeck et al., 2017).
A good example of efficient flood control structures is found in one
of the villages in Golestan province (Haji Abad). The residents of this
village, in anticipation of possible flooding based on warnings from
weather organizations, built a flood wall around the village using sacks
full of local soil, which has prevented inundations (Fig. 10). This ex­
ample shows that flooding can be managed using appropriate measures,
but control plans are unfortunately not available in all areas prone to
flooding. Another major cause of flooding in Iran is the failure to re­
move alluvial depositional sediments and materials that settle in the
beds of rivers in flat areas and cause the accretion of riverbeds, inducing
flooding for lower discharges (Hekmatifar et al., 2010). A lack of riv­
erbed cleanup and vegetation removal from channels can also increase
flooding. Vegetation cover in the main river channel will increase the
flow’s roughness and, therefore, flood depths.
Although the severe 2019 floods in Iran corresponded to rainfall
events with long return periods and probably could not have been
prevented by riverbed soil removal, flood control structures and mea­
sures could have mitigated the extent of the flooding. Many cities in
Iran, such as Ahvaz and Agh-ghala (Fig. 11), are located in close
proximity to large rivers, and therefore even rainfall events with lower
return periods produce flooding, and entire cities can be quickly
K. Khosravi, et al.
inundated as a result of poor watershed management strategies. The
construction of flood wall control structures and/or detention dams and
upland catchment management strategies could effectively prevent in­
undation in those cities.
A key weakness of flood susceptibility maps is that they lack in­
formation regarding flood velocity, depth, and discharge. To implement
a comprehensive flood mitigation plan, it is important to focus on re­
gions with high and very high susceptibility to future flood occurrences
and to identify critical regions from flood inundation maps, such as that
produced as part of this study. Decision-makers can then follow up with
additional studies and field surveys to implement appropriate planning
strategies to design effective prevention measures. Some of the best
flood control measures include controlling runoff from upland areas by
planting vegetation, building check-dams and detention dams for return
periods of more than 50 years, and constructing storage reservoirs in
lowland areas and floodwalls in the periphery of urban communities as
well as smaller dams and levees as appropriate.
5. Conclusion
Flood events are among the most destructive natural hazards and
cause irreparable damage worldwide each year. Because of its topo­
graphy and climate, Iran is prone to flooding and has experienced nu­
merous severe flooding events in recent years. The first essential step in
flood management and the generation of mitigation plans is to delineate
flood-prone areas clearly. In the present study, we prepared a flood
susceptibility map of Iran using a deep CNN algorithm. Ten flood
conditioning factors (slope, altitude, aspect, plan curvature, profile
curvature, rainfall, geology, land use, distance from roads, and distance
from rivers) were identified and used in conjunction with data collected
from 2769 historical flood locations throughout the country to generate
a flood susceptibility map. The resulting map was evaluated quantita­
tively to identify areas with the highest and lowest flood risk and the
key factors contributing to this risk. Our main findings are as follows:
1. CNN has good and acceptable accuracy for identifying flood-prone
areas.
2. Land use and geology are, respectively, the most and least effective
conditioning factors for flood occurrences in Iran.
3. Around 12% of Iran’s land is highly susceptible to flooding, and 3%
is very highly susceptible.
4. A total of 29% and 49% of Iran’s cities are at high and very high risk
for future flood hazards, respectively.
10
Journal of Hydrology 591 (2020) 125552
5. Of the 1243 cities considered in this study, 661 have very high
susceptibility to future flooding hazards, 331 have high suscept­
ibility, 157 have moderate susceptibility, and only 68 and 26 have
low and very low susceptibility, respectively.
6. The Mazandaran, Golestan, Charmahal and Bakhtiari, Lorestan,
Khozestan, West Azarbayjan, Hormozgan, and Kermanshah pro­
vinces have the highest percentages of cities exposed to very high
future flooding risk.
7. Although high rainfall is a key factor in flooding, poor watershed
management (as reflected by the effects of land use as the main
factor responsible for severe flooding) is the leading cause of
flooding events in Iran.
Findings from the present study will prove useful as a starting point
for further research on flood mitigation and can be used by the Iran
Water Resources Management Organization and decision-makers to
design appropriate watershed management strategies and plans. Flood
control measures in Iran are still nascent and should be prioritized to
ensure that further flooding events are prevented.
Author contributions
KK and MP came up with the idea, MP collected data and prepared
layers and performed CNN model. KK and AG did statistical analysis.
KK wrote the first drat. SDK, PMS, DTB, and SL provided critical in­
sights and contributed to the final version of the paper.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ­
ence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Basic Research Project of the
Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM) and
Project of Environmental Business Big Data Platform and Center
Construction funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT. Furthermore,
the authors would like to thank Iran water resources management for
providing the datasets.
K. Khosravi, et al. Journal of Hydrology 591 (2020) 125552

Appendix

Fig. A1. Flood conditioning factors: (a) altitude, (b) slope degree, (c) aspect, (d) plan curvature, (e) profile curvature, (f) distance to river, (g) distance to road, (h)
rainfall, (i) geology, (j) land use.

11
K. Khosravi, et al. Journal of Hydrology 591 (2020) 125552

Fig. A1. (continued)

12
K. Khosravi, et al.
Fig. B1. Non-flood locations in the country.
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