Detecting the Tigris River Flood and its Impact on Residential and Touristic Areas in Mosul City Using Sentinel-2 Satellite Images

Abstract

Iraq is one of the countries with water abundance because it contains water sources distributed between permanent and seasonal flow. The Tigris River is considered as one of these the most important sources, which requires the necessity to monitor the changes that had been taken place in the course of this river and to study the environmental, climatic and erosional changes that were responsible to change the morphodynamic properties of this resource, especially in the rainy years that cause floods and human disasters, such as what happened in the accident of the sinking of the ferry in the city of Mosul. Consequently, the main objective of the current study is based on observing a selected section of the Tigris River basin at the beginning of its entry into Mosul city and studying the effects of changing the water level during different seasons on the banks of the river and its effects on random housing construction near the river. A new European satellite (Sentinel) is used which has high spatial resolution of up to 10 m per pixel, which was the last launch of its series in April 2018. The new QGIS program is also used to process the satellite data, using digital processing methods for interpretation, and to monitor changes in the studied section of the river. Two satellite images are adopted for two consecutive periods (2018 and 2019), corrected and geographically referenced. The conclusion is that there is an increase of 1.105 km2 in the area of the studied river section between the rainy year and the less rainy year, i.e. an approximate increase in excess of 50%. Therefore, the researchers recommend preventing the construction of any residential or touristic projects on the both Tigris River banks within at city of Mosul, and add to the forbidden areas a distance of not less than 50% of the surface area of any section of the river inside the city.