Extreme rainfall associated with mid-tropospheric cut-off low (COL) pressure systems affected the entire east coast of South Africa during April 2022, leading to flooding and destruction of homes, electricity power lines, and road infrastructure, and leaving 448 people confirmed dead. Therefore, this study investigated the evolution of the two COLs and their impacts, including the occurrence of extreme rainfall and cold weather over the southeast coast of the country. We analysed observed and reanalysis meteorological data and mapped areas at risk to impacts of flood hazards on the east coast of South Africa. Extreme rainfall (>500 mm) accumulated over 16 days was observed along the east coast, with the amount of rainfall progressively decreasing inland. We found that the rainfall associated with the first COL was significantly enhanced by the interactions between a strong low-level onshore airflow across the Agulhas Current and the coastal escarpment, resulting in deep convection and lifting. An unusual surface cyclone with tropical characteristics developed over the subtropical southwest Indian Ocean, driving onshore southeasterly winds which enhanced low-level convergence. Moreover, the flood risk results revealed that, amongst others, land cover/use (52.8%), elevation (16.8%) and lithology (15.5%) were the most important flood predictor variables in this study. Much of the study area was found to have very low (28.33%), low (31.82%), and moderate (21.66%) flood risk, whilst the high- and very-high-risk areas accounted for only 17.5% of the total land area. Nonetheless, the derived flood risk map achieved an acceptable level of accuracy of about 89.9% (Area Under Curve = 0.899). The findings of this study contribute to understanding extreme rainfall events and the vulnerability of settlements on South Africa’s east coast to flood risk, which can be used towards natural disaster risk reduction.
With a growing global population and accelerating climate change, systematic assessment and monitoring of crop diseases is urgently required to ensure food security and production. However, current dietary transitions inclined towards vegetables such as tomatoes are expected to increase while effective crop disease monitoring and assessment methods are still limited. Therefore, a state-of-the-art review of progress in the assessment and monitoring of tomato crop diseases using geospatial technologies is presented. Results show that tomato crop diseases and their severity could be detected and discriminated from healthy ones more effectively using various remote sensing systems. Furthermore, the recent advances in RS technologies have greatly facilitated its integration with climatic and topo-edaphic factors to determine the possible drivers of disease infection. Although the use of remotely sensed variables and their integration with bioclimatic factors in understanding tomato crop diseases is still at its infancy, it is one of the most promising technologies.
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