Snow Avalanche Hazard Mapping Using a GIS-Based AHP Approach: A Case of Glaciers in Northern Pakistan from 2012 to 2022

Abstract

Snow avalanches are a type of serious natural disaster that commonly occur in snow-covered mountains with steep terrain characteristics. Susceptibility analysis of avalanches is a pressing issue today and helps decision makers to implement appropriate avalanche risk reduction strategies. Avalanche susceptibility maps provide a preliminary method for evaluating places that are likely to be vulnerable to avalanches to stop or reduce the risks of such disasters. The current study aims to identify areas that are vulnerable to avalanches (ranging from extremely high and low danger) by considering geo-morphological and geological variables and employing an Analytical Hierarchy Approach (AHP) in the GIS platform to identify potential snow avalanche zones in the Karakoram region in Northern Pakistan. The Advanced Space-borne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM) was used to extract the elevation, slope, aspect, terrain roughness, and curvature of the study area. This study includes the risk identification variable of land cover (LC), which was obtained from the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) satellite. The obtained result showed that the approach established in this study provided a quick and reliable tool to map avalanches in the study area, and it might also work with other glacier sites in other parts of the world for snow avalanche susceptibility and risk assessments.