Flood Prediction at The Northern Region of UAE

Abstract

Frequent flooding has been recently observed in the northern part of United Arab Emirates, particularly Ras Al Khaimah region (e.g., 2010, 2011 and 2016 floods). These frequent flood events raised the need for accurate estimates of surface runoff and possibly flooded areas in this region. Flooding is prevalent in this valley-coastal region due to the surrounding mountain stream network, which is characterized by flash floods from high precipitation amounts with high intensities between December and March. Most of the streams in this region have no hydraulic control structures at the outlets to regulate their flows. A hydrologic study was conducted at this urbanized valley-coastal area to identify the flood magnitudes and possible flooded areas using a number of geospatial, hydrologic and hydrodynamic models, namely GIS, HEC-SSP, Win-TR-20 and FESWMS. The study identified the flood magnitudes and possible flooded areas from large floods of return periods vary from 50 to 500-year. FESWMS simulations showed that the flooded area increases for the 500-yr return period compared to the lower ones. The water depth ranges on average from 0.5 to 8.0 m. Due to the natural slope of the simulated coastal area, higher depth was predicted, in general, close to the shoreline, while lower depth was predicted near the mountains.