assessment of flood hazard of jeddah area 2009, saudi arabia2009年吉达地区洪水风险评估,沙特阿拉伯.pdfVIP

Journal of Water Resource and Protection, 2010, 2, 839-847 doi:10.4236/jwarp.2010.29099 Published Online September 2010 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/jwarp) Assessment of Flood Hazard of Jeddah Area 2009, Saudi Arabia Mashael Al Saud Space Research Institute, King Abdel Aziz City for Science and Technology, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia E-mail : geomm5.mashael@ Received June 13, 2010; revised July 7, 2010; accepted July 15, 2010 Abstract Due climatic variability and anthropogenic changes, floods have been raised lately in several regions world- wide. The resulting impact from floods is often harmful. This can be applied to Saudi Arabia, the country which is known by dry climatic conditions, and it became lately a typical region for such natural hazard. Hence, floods are observed as a yearly disaster with high magnitude of influence. Jeddah, a coastal Saudi city on the Red Sea to the west, has witnessed severe event in November 2009, when flooded water and sediments (torrents) invaded the urban areas and resulted decease of many people and destroyed the infra- structure and civilized zones. The lack of mitigation implements exacerbated the problem. This study implies an assessment of flood hazard risk in Jeddah region. It aims to identify the zones subjected to flood and then inducing the influencing factors at different levels of effect. For this purpose space techniques were utilized, with a focus on IKONOS satellite images, which are characterized by high resolution in identifying terrain features. In addition Geographic Information System (GIS) was also used to support space techniques. Thus, damaged areas and the mechanism of fl