Mitigation of flash flood hazards through the optimum utilization of surface water harvesting techniques of Wadi Abu Safaa, northwest of El Shalateen area, Red Sea, Eastern Desert, Egypt

Document Type : Original Article

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Desert Research Center, Cairo, Egypt

Abstract

Flood prevention and mitigation strategies can be facilitated by flood susceptibility mapping (FSM), since it signifies regions with the greatest risk according to physical attributes. Therefore, the current work aims to evaluate the susceptibility to flood hazards in the Abu Safaa watershed. For locating and evaluating possible hazardous zones, nine criteria, namely elevation, slope, flow accumulation, rainfall intensity, distance from drainage, drainage network density, TWI, LULC, and NDVI, were integrated into ArcGIS. A mathematical method for modeling flood hazards and providing decision assistance that considers the weighting and ranking for each flood criteria is called the analytical hierarchy process (AHP), which is used to obtain the Flood Hazard Index (FHI), flash flood hazard zones (FFHs), and then generate a flood susceptibility map. Five assessments of flood potential are detected, ranging from extremely low to very high: 11.21% (very low), 26.5% (low), 32.81% (moderate), 20.18% (high), and 9.3% (very high). For flood mitigation purposes, FSM and the selected morphometric parameter results were used to conduct a weighted spatial probability model to figure out probable regions for capturing rainwater, as well as the proposed strategy with suitable locations of water harvesting structures for direct usage as surface water storage, indirect usage as groundwater recharge, or a combination of both. The present study's findings show that the Abu Safaa basin accepted 61.4 × 106 m3 of rainfall in February 2018, which led to a water harvesting potential of about 10.3 × 106 m3 and total losses of about 51.1 × 106 m3

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