A new study from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering researchers, along with researchers from the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris at the University of Paris Cité, has found that the increase in soil erosion in coastal areas due to desertification is worsening flood impacts on Middle Eastern and North African port cities.
A new study from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering researchers, along with researchers from the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris at the University of Paris Cité, has found that the increase in soil erosion in coastal areas due to desertification is worsening flood impacts on Middle Eastern and North African port cities. The researchers focused their observations on the devastating 2023 floods in the city of Derna, Libya, which took the lives of more than 11,300 people and showed how the increase in soil erosion significantly contributed to the catastrophic toll of these unusual desert floods. The research, published in Nature Communications, was published almost a year after the deadly flood happened on the September 10, 2023. The co-authors believe that their work sheds light on the alarming vulnerability that arid areas face given the rising frequency of extreme weather events due to climate change and the urgent need for advanced earth observations programs to monitor and characterize these areas.
Background:
Over the past decade, the North African Sahara, an area larger than the continental United States, has faced a dangerous combination of conditions; increasingly arid conditions which are interrupted by intense, coastal rainstorms. The source of such changes are as follows: increasing desertification has led to intensified droughts, and rainstorms in the region have increased in frequency due to the rising seawater temperature in the Eastern Mediterranean because of global warming. The paper’s corresponding author, Essam Heggy, who is a research scientist in the Microwave Systems, Sensors, and Imaging Lab (MiXIL) within the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a co-principal investigator at the USC Viterbi Center for Arid and Water Research Exploration (AWARE), says that together, these two extreme conditions are increasing soil erosion and generating deadly mud flows that are hard to control with the aging dams that exist in the area.
Read more at University of Southern California
Image: Map showing (in red) the areas where heavy erosion was detected by satellite radar images following Storm Daniel in the watersheds of Eastern Libya and how the the streams loaded with high amounts of sediment contributed to the severe damage in Derna and Susah. (Credit: Credit to USC Center for Arid Climate Water Research Center (AWARE))
