Newspapers as a validation proxy for GIS modeling in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates: identifying flood-prone areas

Abstract

The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction listed 10 reasons businesses should reduce their disaster exposure, including risk factoring, which cannot be achieved without historical data about hazards, their locations, magnitudes, and frequencies. Substantial hazard data are reported by newspapers, which could add value to disaster management decision making. In this study, a text-mining program extracted keywords related to floods’ geographic location, date, and damages from newspaper analyses of flash floods in Fujairah, UAE, from 2000–2018. The paper describes extracting such information as well as geocoding and validating flood-prone areas generated through geographic information system (GIS) modeling. The generation of flood-prone areas was based on elevation, slope, land use, soil, and geology coupled with topographic wetness index, topographic position index, and curve number. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) produced relative weight for each factor, and GIS map algebra generated flood-prone areas. AHP inclusion helped minimize weight subjectivity among various experts. Of all areas, 85% are considered medium and low flood-prone zones, mainly mountainous areas. However, the 15% that are high/very high are dominated by urban areas in low coastal plains, predisposing them to flash floods. Eighty-four percent of flood events reported by newspapers were in areas rated as high/very high flood-prone zones. In the absence of flood records, newspapers reports can be used as a reference. Policymakers should assess whether flood-prone area models offer accurate analyses. These findings are useful for organizations related to disaster management, urban planning, insurance, archiving, and documentation.

Geospatial Multicriteria Analysis for Earthquake Risk Assessment: Case Study of Fujairah City in the UAE

“…Previous earthquake seismicity research [9,40] observed a decline in PGA as distance increases from the epicenter. In the current research, given that no major seismograph events occurred in the UAE, ground acceleration was calculated using the ground motion prediction equation that considers all the historical earthquake events in the entire Arabian Plate from previous researches [36,41]. As stated in [12], only two major faults exert a direct seismicity effect on the UAE: the Zagros Fold [14] and the thrust belt in Makran zone [3,11].…”

“…As stated in [12], only two major faults exert a direct seismicity effect on the UAE: the Zagros Fold [14] and the thrust belt in Makran zone [3,11]. In this study, PGA has been established employing attenuation relation by the following equation [41,42].…”

“…Fault lines were extracted from Landsat 8 satellite images of 30 meters spatial resolution, and then, the Euclidean distance was calculated. Near distances of up to 200 km from fault lines were considered the most seismic prone [41]. The soil layer comprises torripasmments, calciorthids, saliorthids, torrifluvents, gypsiorthids torriorthents, and salorthids.…”

“…The soil layer comprises torripasmments, calciorthids, saliorthids, torrifluvents, gypsiorthids torriorthents, and salorthids. Torripasmments being clay rich is not at risk for seismicity [36], whereas saliorthids, calciorthids, and torrifluvents are more seismically prone in the UAE than the other soil classes [3,41]. A slope spatial map was derived from the (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) ASTER digital elevation model (DEM) with a resolution of 3 m. Although most of the land shares similar slopes, higher steep slopes are found in the north-eastern part of UAE.…”

Identifying oceanographic conditions conducive to coastal impacts on temperate open coastal beaches and the importance of empirical impact data

“…Hence, the public perception of increasingly frequent and severe impacts could be skewed by the shifting baselines of normalcy, against which the extremeness and remarkability of a particular event are assessed. However, such news and social media-based assessments of impacts have been shown to deliver comparable results to those using conventional threshold-based (Moore and Obradovich 2020) or modelling (Habel et al 2020;Yagoub et al 2020) approaches. Moore and Obradovich (2020) identi ed some circumstances where ood thresholds derived using social media observations were more representative of the vertical height at which impacts typically associated with minor ood occur, than the actual de ned minor thresholds.…”