Assessment of several flood estimation methodologies in Makkah metropolitan area, Saudi Arabia
- PDF / 423,724 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 99 Downloads / 192 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Assessment of several flood estimation methodologies in Makkah metropolitan area, Saudi Arabia Gomaa M. Dawod & Meraj N. Mirza & Khalid A. Al-Ghamdi
Received: 26 February 2011 / Accepted: 18 September 2011 / Published online: 6 October 2011 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2011
Abstract Estimation of floods in a hydrological basin is essential for efficient flood management and development planning. Several approaches have been proposed to estimate flood peak discharge based on topographic and morphometric characteristics of ungauged hydrological basins. Two global approaches, namely the rational and the curve number methods, along with four national regression models have been compared over Makkah metropolitan area, Saudi Arabia. The curve number methodology has been taken as the basis of comparison due to its precision and wide utilization. Results show that the rational method produces differences equal to 44% in terms of peak discharges. Moreover, the best national regression model gives difference in the order of 18% with respect to the curve number results. Other national models give results very far away from those of the curve number (up to 95%), which can be considered as measures for their awful accuracy. Hence, the curve number is recommended as an optimum methodology for flood estimation, in G. M. Dawod Survey Research Institute, Giza, Egypt M. N. Mirza Center of Research Excellence in Hajj and Omrah, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia K. A. Al-Ghamdi Geography Department, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia Present Address: G. M. Dawod (*) Umm Al-Qura University, P.O. Box 715, Makkah 21955, Saudi Arabia e-mail: [email protected]
Makkah city, in case of availability of geological, metrological, land use, and topographic datasets. Otherwise, a specific national regression model (Al-Subai) may be utilized in a simple way. Keywords Flood assessment . Rainfall–runoff models . Ungauged catchments . Saudi Arabia
Introduction Hazards of flash floods are vital in terms of human lives loss and economical damages. Flash floods affect local residents in a dangerous way particularly in developing countries, and flood hazard maps should be available and updated (Hagen and Lu 2011). Economically speaking, floods produce significant financial loss so that a flood assessment model should include the estimation of economic damages (Hsu et al. 2011). Utilization of recent technologies, such as the geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing (RS), in developing flood hazard maps is gaining increasing attention in the last couple of decades (e.g., Forkuo 2011; Mouri et al. 2011; Parker et al. 2011; Dang et al. 2011; and Soussa et al. 2010). A reliable estimation of floods in a hydrological basin is crucial for efficient flood management and surface water resources planning. On a national level, a precise flood assessment is considered as an important demand in Makkah metropolitan area, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) due to the unexpected nature of rainfall that often produ
Data Loading...
