Analyzing disaster-forming environments and the spatial distribution of flood disasters and snow disasters that occurred in China from 1949 to 2000

Flood disasters and snow disasters are frequent disasters in China, causing considerable economic loss and serious damage to towns and farms. The problems of how these two disaster types distribute and what disaster-forming environments are important to their occurrence are the most pressing problems in disaster risk assessment and salvage material arrangement. The present study aims to establish the regularity of flood/snow disaster outbreaks and the important disaster-forming environmental factors, and a spatial autocorrelation analysis method and a canonical correlation analysis method are used to answer these two questions separately. Experimental results indicate that serious flood disasters distributemainly on the south area of China and snowdisasters occur on the north area; those areas should be allocated correspondingly more salvage materials. And some disaster-forming environmental factors are important for the occurrence of flood/snow disasters, and can be used in disaster risk assessment. Crown Copyright© 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.