contribution of morphometry to flood studies in the Luís Alves Basin/SC, Brazil

Abstract Floods in watersheds can be caused by natural and/or anthropogenic factors. Since morphometric parameters are responses to hydrologic regime and express geological-geomorphological conditions, the morphometric methodology is useful in the investigation of the possibility of floods development, especially when hydrological data is not available. To develop this studydata from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics - IBGE were used on 1:50.000 scale, and CBERS image (2010).The Luís Alves River is confluent of Itajaí River and presents 6th grade of magnitude on Strahler´s Stream Order, draining an area of 582.00 km2and it is situated under a 1800 mm regime of annual precipitation. The morphometric parameters that indicate susceptibility to flooding are the basin area, drainage density, hydrographic density, bifurcation ratio, topographic texture, 1st order stream frequency, average length of first-order channels and stream order. The parameters circularity indexes, compactness coefficient, form factor and shape index, important in determining susceptibility to flooding pointed middle tendency in relation to flooding