Water/Land Use Planning of Wadi El-Arish Watershed, Central Sinai, Egypt Using RS, GIS and WMS Techniques

Abstract

"Water crisis in Sinai arid region is a major problem and urgently needs to be solved. When flash floods occur, the usual practice is to dispose the flood water into the sea without any benefit, except for a small portion that can be stored in the existing reservoirs. The present work applied an adopted strategy for determining the water/land use priority areas for development depending on the implementation of effective runoff water harvesting (RWH) techniques, side-by-side, with the using of available groundwater. This conjunctive water use gives an optimum pattern for water/land use in Wadi El-Arish watershed. For this sake, the geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing satellite ETM+ images, watershed modeling system (WMS 8.0© Software) and GIS weighted spatial probability modeling (WSPM) were integrated to recognize the water/land use priority areas for agricultural and socio-economic activities. Four thematic layers represented by the volume of annual flood, groundwater prospective zones, suitability of geological units for agricultural development, and land slope of the basin were used to build the WSPM model within the ArcGIS 10.1© software platform. A map of water/land use priority areas for development was produced. This map classified the study area into five classes ranked from the very high (1906.49 km2) to very low (2441.56 km2) promising areas for new socio-economic settlements. The present article introduced a genuine proposal to utilize the locations of RWH constructions, i.e. dams, cisterns or surface water reservoirs to optimize the potentiality of sustainable development in the determined promising areas."