Flooding is one of the major natural disasters that affects many parts of the world and has led to huge amounts of property damages and human life losses, especially in developing countries (Wilby et al., 2008; Cook and Merwade, 2009; Spence et al., 2011; Arnell and Gosling, 2016; Liu et al., 2017). Over the past decades, several hydraulic models have been developed and integrated with geographic information systems (GIS). The performance of these models depends on several factors and running a hydraulic model for a river reached can be complicated especially for data-limited regions. Instead of using these models for the estimation of flood extent and flood depth, we can use a simple and fast method called the HAND method for this issue.
The Height Above Nearest Drainage (HAND), first introduced by Renno et al. 2008, is a hydrological terrain analysis method, that has been used for flood hazard mapping, flood susceptibility, and hydrological modeling in different parts of the world (Rodda, 2005; Huang et al. 2017; Afshari et al. 2018; Zheng et al. 2018). In this method, the vertical distance between a cell in a topography map and the nearest cell along a river that it drains into defines the HAND value (Afshari et al. 2018). All grid cells on the topography map that have a HAND value lower than the specified water level are considered inundated.