Assessment Analysis of Flood Susceptibility in Tropical Desert Area: A Case Study of Yemen

Flooding is one of the catastrophic natural hazards worldwide that can easily cause devastating effects on human life and property. Remote sensing devices are becoming increasingly important in monitoring and assessing natural disaster susceptibility and hazards. The proposed research work pursues an assessment analysis of flood susceptibility in a tropical desert environment: a case study of Yemen. The base data for this research were collected and organized from meteorological, satellite images, remote sensing data, essential geographic data, and various data sources and used as input data into four machine learning (ML) algorithms. In this study, RS data (Sentinel-1 images) were used to detect flooded areas in the study area. We also used the Sentinel application platform (SNAP 7.0) for Sentinel-1 image analysis and detecting flood zones in the study locations. Flood spots were discovered and verified using Google Earth images, Landsat images, and press sources to create a flood inventory map of flooded areas in the study area. Four ML algorithms were used to map flash flood susceptibility (FFS) in Tarim city (Yemen): K-nearest neighbor (KNN), Naive Bayes (NB), random forests (RF), and eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). Twelve flood conditioning factors were prepared, assessed in multicollinearity, and used with flood inventories as input parameters to run each model. A total of 600 random flood and non-flood points were chosen, where 75% and 25% were used as training and validation datasets. The confusion matrix and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) were used to validate the susceptibility maps. The results obtained reveal that all models had a high capacity to predict floods (AUC > 0.90). Further, in terms of performance, the tree-based ensemble algorithms (RF, XGBoost) outperform other ML algorithms, where the RF algorithm provides robust performance (AUC = 0.982) for assessing flood-prone areas with only a few adjustments required prior to training the model. The value of the research lies in the fact that the proposed models are being tested for the first time in Yemen to assess flood susceptibility, which can also be used to assess, for example, earthquakes, landslides, and other disasters. Furthermore, this work makes significant contributions to the worldwide effort to reduce the risk of natural disasters, particularly in Yemen. This will, therefore, help to enhance environmental sustainability.

Automated summary

This study assesses flood susceptibility in the desert environment of Yemen using remote sensing devices and machine learning algorithms. The results show that all models have a high capacity to predict floods, with the tree-based ensemble algorithms performing the best. This research is important for assessing disaster susceptibility and reducing the risk of natural disasters.