Potential flood risk due to urbanization expansion in arid environments, Saudi Arabia
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Potential flood risk due to urbanization expansion in arid environments, Saudi Arabia Jarbou Bahrawi1 · Hatem Ewea1 · Ahmed Kamis1 · Mohamed Elhag1,2 Received: 9 September 2019 / Accepted: 16 July 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Urbanization of watersheds is known to increase the flood risk potentials. Since 1970, eastern Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, underwent rapid urbanization due to the high rate of population growth and the booming economy, which attracts hundreds of thousands of expatriates. Such urbanizations change drastically the flood characteristics and enhance the risk from such watersheds as shown in 2009 and 2011 severe floods. To investigate the general relationship between the increases in flood peaks following historical urbanization in eastern Jeddah watersheds, satellite remote sensing data and meteorological data are developed. The utilization of high-resolution remote sensing data in temporal data analysis resulted in high classification accuracies using support vector machine as a classifier algorithm. The study area was classified into five different types of land use/land cover to quantify the changes that occurred between the bare rock and bare soil land cover classes. Three different data sets of images were synchronized with rainfall records, and hydrological data are used via watershed modeling systems. Such models are also used to obtain a quantitative estimate of the current potential risks. It is concluded that on average, the peak flows and the volumes increased by about 119% and about 89%, respectively. Keywords Classification · Peak flow · Remote sensing · Temporal analysis · Watershed management
1 Introduction In the last few decades, special attentions were concerned with studying the impacts of persistent urbanization development on flood hazardous due to continuing development in remote sensing and GIS techniques. The effect of increasing urbanization on the hazards of flash floods becomes an issue of concern for many researchers around the world. Jeddah
* 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
2
Department of Applied Geosciences, Faculty of Science, German University of Technology in Oman, Muscat 1816, Oman
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Natural Hazards
floods have been studied through Al-Othman (2011). However, historical urbanization effects on flood-prone areas do not assess or studied before. Jeddah’s population increased from 2,821,371 (2004) to 3,976,400 (2014) with an average annual growth rate of 4%. This increase can be attributed to both natural population growth and economic growth, which attracted thousands of expatriates with their families. Since Jeddah metropolitan area is densely populated, the urbanization expansion was directed to the east of the city toward the wadi region. Up to 2009, Jeddah faced very dry seasons for 10 years, which led to a relaxation of the authorities concerning
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