English abstract
With a long coastline on the Arabian Sea, Sultanate of Oman is located on the typical path of North Indian Ocean tropical cyclones. In June 2007, the country was exposed to the tropical Cyclone Gonu, a category five storm, which reached a maximum wind speed of about 250 km per hour. Three years later, Tropical Cyclone Phet hit Oman as a category three storm. In November 2011, two deep tropical depressions struck the country. These climatic phenomena have provoked infrastructural damage, private, public, and affected land use. The death toll resulting from Gonu is estimated at 49 person and the property damage is estimated at 4 billion Dollar. Phet's death toll is 17 person, in addition to missing people and a total economic damage of about 850 million Dollar. The deep tropical depressions which occurred in November 2011 resulted in the death of 11 person. Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques are useful tools to predict and plot the path of the cyclone, and to assess the damage caused by the floods. The technique is also useful in land use change detection before and after the cyclone. This study seeks to assess the effects of cyclone Gonu and cyclone Phet on land use in the Sur City. The RS technique has been used to determine the land use areas affected after each cyclone, while the GIS technique has been used to calculate the total area affected and the percentage of each type of land use. This tools is considered a modern, fast and reliable process to determine the cyclone effects.
Two high resolution images (IKONOS and WorldView) have been used. The analysis results show that more than 9% of the studied total area was affected by flooding caused by the GONU cyclone, and 15.7% was affected by Phet. The results also show that the most severely affected land use areas were the green ones with 15.5% during Gonu and 59% during Phet, roads with 6 % affected during Gonu and 23.5% during Phet, and buildings with 8% affected during Gonu and 24.5% during Phet.
