Flood study in Qatar : challenges and opportunities

![CDATA[Qatar is a Middle Eastern country characterised by an arid climate with periodic rainfall events. Some of these events generate high volumes of rainfall runoff that is capable of producing significant flooding issues. This scenario coupled with predicted long term effects of climate change, namely, increases in precipitation and sea level rise, would potentially magnify the impact and magnitude of future flash flood events in this region. As significant development progresses in the region, urban planning and policy need to account for potential effects of flood hazard and subsequent mitigation measures. Flood studies are invaluable tools in this regard for predicting behaviour of floodwaters and allow forecasting potential impacts on existing developments, whilst serving as a guide to control future developments in flood prone areas. Key challenges faced in developing a flood study in the arid regions of Middle East include availability and resolution of topographical and land use data, lack of rainfall and gauged catchment data, among others. This situation poses a challenge to hydrologic model calibration and overall modelling. However, such a situation provides an opportunity for testing a phased approach, which has been proposed in this paper. This approach proposes flood modelling with a pilot catchment, allowing users to identify best possible regional data set to tailor various modelling parameters to interrogate the model and its outputs prior to enabling full scale flood modelling for a larger study area. Results of a phased approach enable the development of more precise flood maps in areas where data may be scarce and thus enable a more accurate planning and mitigation phase of a study. The findings of this paper would be useful to hydrologic modelling in arid regions where recorded flood data is scarce, and the hydrological variability is high.]]