Advanced remote sensing techniques in flash flood delineation in Tabuk City, Saudi Arabia
- PDF / 2,130,544 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 18 Downloads / 173 Views
Advanced remote sensing techniques in flash flood delineation in Tabuk City, Saudi Arabia Mohamed Elhag1 · Shemsu G. Abdurahman1 Received: 26 September 2019 / Accepted: 22 June 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Flash floods have been the most frequent, extensive, and dangerous type of worldwide natural crisis. Mountainous, urbanized, and arid land areas like Tabuk region of Saudi Arabia are highly vulnerable to flooding due to heavy and sudden rainstorms that affected the people, infrastructures, and ecological and biophysical environment. Immediately following such a disaster event, advanced techniques are very essential to delineate and assess the damage resulted from successful rescue and relief operations. In this article, the European Space Agency (ESA) freely accessed images were conducted from the earth observation synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor, the images were successfully practiced to delineate the deadly flood crisis took place in Tabuk City in January 2019. The Sentinel Application Platform for Sentinel-1 Toolbox (S1TBX) is used to support the display and analysis of the large archive of products from the ESA SAR mission. Level-1 ground range detected with high resolution of 20 m × 22 m image at 2019/01/30 T15:39:44 acquired and processed. A backscatter value of − 22.39 dub is selected to separate water from everything else. Only region of interest mask pixels are considered for the histogram analysis. Accordingly, the maximum threshold error is set to 0.255. RGB map created a binary mask of flooded, and non-flooded pixels show that a significant part of the area was in danger. The findings of the current methodology quantify the flooded surface area by almost 9 km2 covers mainly the agricultural practices and the urban areas of the city of Tabuk. This study recommends that the future master plan of the Tabuk area should consider similar flooding risks. Finally, most arid lands like Tabuk are covered by sand that has similar backscatter as flooded land conditions. Therefore, the influence of this backscatter in flood mapping works should be assessed and exclusion techniques must be included to increase accuracy. Keywords Flood mapping · Image processing · SNAP toolbox · Sentinel-1 · Tabuk
* Mohamed Elhag [email protected] 1
Department of Hydrology and Water Resources Management, Faculty of Meteorology, Environment and Arid Land Agriculture, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Natural Hazards
1 Introduction In the twenty-first century, floods have been the most frequent, extensive and dangerous type of worldwide natural crisis caused mainly by climate change (Jha et al. 2012; Martinis 2017; Hu et al. 2019). Besides, significant torrential rain, poor drainage system along with geomorphologic, anthropogenic, and geological factors have caused flash flooding (Youssef et al. 2016b). Flash flood is the result of the concatenation of meteorological and hydrological circumstances (Elhag and Bahrawi 2019). According to Rahman (2019), the inter
Data Loading...
