ِDr. Ahmed M. Youssef

• Ph. D. (Professor of Geological hazards and Engineering)
• Consultant at Saudi Geological Survey

Jizan mountainous areas in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are suffering from a variety of slope failures. Most of these failures happen due to heavy rainfalls from time to time. These landslides include rock topples, rockslides, debris flow, and some combination of these which affected many roads, highways, and buildings. The Al-Raith Road is one of these...

A rock fall hazard rating study was conducted along the roads of Fayfa Mountain in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to determine hazardous zones and to specify remediation and/or mitigation measures to improve the safety of the steep mountain roads. The mountain consists mainly of a weathered and/or fractured syenite core draped with slate, phylitic, an...

ABSTRACT In the recent years, the Egyptian government and private sector have been interested in developing the desert areas that located between the limestone plateau and the recent flood plain of the River Nile both the east and west sides. These areas represent a corner stone as a source of aggregate materials that used essentially as sub-base m...

The formation of earth fissures due to groundwater depletion has been reported in many places in North America, Europe, and Asia. Najran Basin is in the southern part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and agricultural activities and other groundwater uses have caused significant groundwater depletion there. The basin recently experienced a sudden app...

Flood hazards play a vital role in land use planning and have profound implications if they are not considered in the early development phases. Detecting the likelihood of flood hazards and estimating their probability and magnitude are complex tasks that require integration of multidisciplinary approaches. In this study, a national flood susceptib...

Climate change, specifically global warming, is expected to increase the intensity of the hydrological cycle, leading to more frequent and severe precipitation events and destructive floods. Urbanization is an inexorable phenomenon resulting from societal and economic progress. Urban regions, characterized by high population density, extensive infr...

Sinkholes, the most observed and occurring geohazards in Saudi Arabia, pose significant risks, spreading over 60% of the country. Karst features, associated with carbonate and evaporite rocks’ dissolution activities, represent the most observed geohazards in the eastern and northern portions of Saudi Arabia. Sinkholes, the prominent features of the...

This study demonstrates the effectiveness of integrating Magnetic and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) remote sensing data to identify hydrothermal alteration zones and structural features associated with gold mineralization in Egypt’s Fatira region. We employed the Center for Exploration-Targeting (CET) porphy...

Each year, thousands of tourists visit Egypt’s Wadi Feiran region, which is one of the most popular tourist sites in the Sinai Peninsula. The region’s topography is distinctive and diverse, making it particularly susceptible to “natural disasters” (such as floods and landslides). The current study deals with landslide hazards as a critical hazard t...

In the domains of geological study, natural resource exploitation, geological hazards, sustainable development, and environmental management, lithological mapping holds significant importance. Conventional approaches to lithological mapping sometimes entail considerable effort and difficulties, especially in geographically isolated or inaccessible...

Each year, thousands of tourists visit Egypt's Wadi Feiran region, one of the most popular tourist sites in the Sinai Peninsula. The region’s topography is distinctive and diverse, making it particularly susceptible to “natural disasters” (such as floods and landslides). The current study deals with landslide hazards as a critical hazard type, wher...

The current study aimed at producing a multi-hazard susceptibility map for the Hasher-Fayfa Basin. The basin is part of the Jazan region in southwestern Saudi Arabia and is characterized by mountainous terrain. Recently, this area has experienced many extreme natural processes, which become natural hazard events when they intersect with human activ...

In the Gabal Shulman area of the southeastern desert of Egypt, ASTER and geophysical aeromagnetic data provide useful information for detecting hydrothermal alteration zones and structural features at the surface and subsurface. The band ratio of the data from ASTER, constrained energy minimization (CEM) and Crósta algorithms help to identify new p...

Floods are among the most destructive disasters because they cause immense damage to human life, property (land and buildings), and resources. They also slow down a country’s economy. Due to the dynamic and complex nature of floods, it is difficult to predict the areas that are prone to flooding. In this study, an attempt was made to create a suita...

The Saudi Geological Survey (SGS) conducted a flood hazard assessment study for the entire country. Detailed precipitation data until 2020 were collected, and flood discharges of 5216 basins ranging from small basins (< 1 km2) to very large basins (> 10,000 km2) were calculated using a precipitation-based hydrological model with a return period of...

Wadi El-Matulla, located in the eastern desert of Egypt, is the most important water basin. The Qift–Qusayr highway (west–east direction) and the Cairo–Aswan eastern desert highway (north–south direction) pass through the watershed. Many urban areas (villages and industrial areas) and agricultural lands are located at the outlet of these basins. In...

Saudi Arabia is affected by various types of natural hazards that affect people's lives and property. In this paper, the effects of landslides and floods in Wadi Dawqah in Bahah region, Saudi Arabia, are studied. Mountainous regions are exposed to natural hazards that require modeling to produce multi-hazard maps. Three models were used in this stu...

Floods are among the most devastating environmental hazards that directly and indirectly affect people’s lives and activities. In many countries, sustainable environmental management requires the assessment of floods and the likely flood-prone areas to avoid potential hazards. In this study, the performance and capabilities of seven machine learnin...

The current study aimed at producing a multi-hazard risk map for Hasher-Fayfa Basin. The Basin is part of Jazan region in the southwestern Saudi Arabia and is distinguished by mountainous terrain. Recently, this area has experienced many extreme natural processes that become natural hazard events when it intersects with human activities (urban area...

To be proactive in mountain hazard mitigation, landslide disaster assessments are becoming increasingly urgent. In this study, three modeling techniques, namely, support vector machine (SVM), convolutional neural network (CNN-1D), and (CNN-2D), were applied and their outcomes were compared for landslide susceptibility mapping at Asir Region, Saudi...

Rockfalls and unstable slopes pose a serious threat to people and property along roads/highways in the southwestern mountainous regions of Saudi Arabia. In this study, the application of terrestrial light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology was applied aiming to propose a strategy to analyze and accurately depict the detection of rockfall chan...

Flooding is a natural but inevitable phenomenon that occurs over time. It not only damages human lives, property, and resources but also slows down the economy of a country. In this study, an attempt was made to establish suitability map for future urban development based on flood vulnerability maps in Taif catchment area, Saudi Arabia. For this pu...

Geohazard risk is high in Arab countries due to ineffective disaster preparedness measures, mismanagement, lack of public awareness, inadequate funding and lack of stakeholder support. One such country is Egypt, which is hit by floods every year that cost lives and bring the economy to a standstill. Moreover, not much has been done to map flood-pro...

Recently, Egypt has faced unprecedented development with rapid urban and infrastructure expansion. Vast areas of Egypt are underlain by karst rocks (carbonate and evaporite). Highways and roads constructed along these karst areas are susceptible to slope stability problems. In this work, remote sensing imagery, field investigation, and laboratory s...

The Wadi El-Matulla, located in the eastern desert of Egypt, is the most important water basin. The Qift - Qusayr highway (west-east direction) and the Cairo - Aswan eastern desert highway (north-south) pass through the basin. Many urban areas (villages and industrial areas) and agricultural lands are located at the outlet of these basins. In addit...

Floods are among the most devastating environmental hazards that directly and indirectly affect people's lives and activities. In many countries, sustainable environmental management requires identifying inundated-prone areas to avoid potential hazards. In this study, the performance and capabilities of seven machine learning algorithms (MLAs) were...

On November 23, 2018, cascading rainfall events that occurred in the upstream section of wadi Al-Lith, which is located in the western part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, caused a failure in the Al-Lith earthen dam. This event was followed by a large-scale devastating flood that inundated the area downstream of the dam, damaging infrastructure and...

Recently, Egypt has faced unprecedented development with rapid urban and infrastructure expansion. Vast areas of Egypt are underlain by karst rocks (carbonate and evaporite). Highways and roads constructed along these karst areas are susceptible to slope stability problems. Various factors could trigger different landslides along the carbonate rock...

Floods represent catastrophic environmental hazards that have a significant impact on the environment and human life and their activities. Environmental and water management in many countries require modeling of flood susceptibility to help in reducing the damages and impact of floods. The objective of the current work is to employ four data mining...

The current study aimed at evaluating the capabilities of seven advanced machine learning techniques (MLTs), including, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline (MARS), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Naive Bayes (NB), fo...

For public safety, especially for people who dwell in the valley that is located downstream of a dam site, as well as the protection of economic and environmental resources, risk management programs are urgently required all over the world. Despite the high safety standards of dams because of improved engineering and excellent construction in recen...

In this paper, multispectral and multi-temporal satellite data were used to assess the spatial and temporal evolution of the agriculture activities in the Al-Jouf region, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). In the current study, an attempt was made to map the agriculture sprawl from 1987 to 2017 using temporal Landsat images in a geographic information...

This study deals with the use of remote sensing (RS), geographic information systems (GISs), hydrologic modeling (water modeling system, WMS), and hydraulic modeling (Hydrologic Engineering Center River Analysis System, HEC-RAS) to evaluate the impact of flash flood hazards on the sustainable urban development of Tabuk City, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia...

Nowadays, the use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) is emerging as a powerful tool for the assessment of different types of natural hazards. Flash floods are among the most severe natural hazards which have disastrous socio-economic impacts. For that, it is so urgent to develop flash flood susceptibility hazard map to delineate flood prone ar...

Multi-hazard assessment modeling comprises an essential tool in any plan that aims to mitigate the impact of future natural disasters. For a particular area they can be generated by combining assessment maps for different types of natural hazards. In the present study, the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) supported by a Geographical Information S...

The New Hail Economic City in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is one of the pioneer projects and represents a corner stone for the new development activities for Hail region. It is located to the north of the Hail city, covering an area of ~156 km². Fundamental facilities of this project will include infrastructure, residential, commercial, industrial,...

Karst environments are characterized by distinctive landforms related to dissolution characteristics. Karst terrains, frequently underlain by cavernous carbonate and/or evaporite rocks, may induce ground instability problems. Impacts and problems associated with karst are rapidly increasing as development expands upon the karst prone areas. This ha...

Karst rocks cover a wide area of Egypt. These rocks include soluble sediments such as carbonate rock formations, evaporites, and sabkha deposits that are characterized by karstification features. Karst features could affect many current and developing projects (urban areas and infrastructure). The areas covered by the rocks susceptible to karstific...

Coupling of 3D remote sensing images, Field sketching and field investigation represent interesting techniques to understand and evaluate the slope stability problems along rock cut slopes. These methods were applied along the highway section that connects the Sohag, Red Sea, and Cairo governorates on the eastern plateau, Egypt. It is one of the mos...

Different types of geological hazards are induced by human activities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). These geological hazards include land subsidence and earth fissures, sinkholes, expansive soils, and flash floods. A wide variety of recent geological hazards have been reported in several areas, causing significant human and property losses....

Suichuan is a mountainous area at the Jiangxi province in Central China, where rainfall-induced landslides occur frequently. The purpose of this study is to assess landslide susceptibility of this region using support vector machine (SVM) with four kernel functions: polynomial (PL), radial basis function (RBF), sigmoid (SIG), and linear (LN). A tot...

Preparation of natural hazards maps are vital and essential for urban development. The main scope of this study is to synthesize natural hazard maps in a single multi-hazard map and thus to identify suitable areas for the urban development. The study area is the drainage basin of Xerias stream(Northeastern Peloponnesus, Greece) that has frequently...

The main objective of the study was to evaluate and compare the overall performance of three methods, frequency ratio (FR), certainty factor (CF) and index of entropy (IOE), for rainfall-induced landslide susceptibility mapping at the Chongren area (China) using geographic information system and remote sensing. First, a landslide inventory map for...

The city of Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) has experienced two catastrophic flash flood events in 2009 and 2011. These flood events had catastrophic effect on human lives and livelihoods around the wadi Muraikh, wadi Qus, wadi Methweb, and wadi Ghulail in which 113 people were dead and with 10,000 houses and 17,000 vehicles were damaged. Thus, a comprehensi...

Approximately 60 % of the 2,150,000 km2 area of Saudi Arabia is underlain by soluble sediments (carbonate and evaporite rock formations, salt diapirs, sabkha deposits). Despite its hyper-arid climate, a wide variety of recent sinkholes have been reported in numerous areas, involving significant property losses. Human activities, most notably ground...

The purpose of the current study is to produce landslide susceptibility maps using different data mining models. Four modeling techniques, namely random forest (RF), boosted regression tree (BRT), classification and regression tree (CART), and general linear (GLM) are used, and their results are compared for landslides susceptibility mapping at the...

The purpose of the current study is to produce landslide susceptibility maps using different probabilistic and bivariate statistical approaches; namely, frequency ratio (FR), weights-of-evidence (WofE), index-of-entropy (IofE), and Dempster-Shafer (DS) models, at Wadi Itwad, Asir region, in the southwestern part of Saudi Arabia. Landslide locations...

10.1007/s10064-015-0734-9

The Jeddah city is located in a coastal plain area, in the middle of the western side of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, bounded by the Red Sea to the west and mountains to the east. Jeddah city receives rainfall runoff from the foothills through different drainage pathways (wadis). During intense rainfall events, runoff flows westward from the hills...

This paper presents an evaluation of two bivariate statistical approaches, frequency ratio (FR) and weights-of-evidence (WoE) for landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) at south-western part of Saudi Arabia, Jizan region. Landslide locations were identified and mapped from interpretation of high resolution satellite images (GeoEye 0.5 m and QuikeBi...

Escarpment highways, roads and mountainous areas in Saudi Arabia are facing landslide hazards that are frequently occurring from time to time causing considerable damage to these areas. Shear escarpment highway is located in the north of the Abha city. It is the most important escarpment highway in the area, where all the light and heavy trucks and...

Mountain areas in the southern western corner of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) frequently suffer from various types of landsides induced by rainstorms and anthropogenic activities. To mitigate these problems, landslide susceptibility mapping and classification is important to develop quick and safe mitigation or remediation measures and to help...

Rockfall is one of the major concerns along different urban areas and highways all over the world. Al-Noor Mountain is one of the areas that threaten rockfalls to the Al-Noor escarpment track road and the surrounding urban areas. Thousands of visitors and tourisms use the escarpment track road to visit Hira cave which is located at the top of Al-No...

Numerous land subsidence events have been recently reported from central and northern parts of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Hail, Al Qassim, Al Jowf, and Buraydah Provinces. In some cases, these incidences resulted in losses in life and property. In this study, an integrated (field, geologic, remote sensing) approach is applied to accomplish the...

Samma escarpment road is located in Asir Region, Saudi Arabia. It is located NW of Abha city. This escarpment road represents a major corridor in the area which connects different cities and touristic resorts in the region. It is descended from Sudah plateau at about 2700 m above sea level (asl) toward Wadi al Aws at about 1500 m asl. The total len...

During the planning of urban environment, usually economic and social parameters are taken into consideration. As a result, urban planning areas are susceptible and vulnerable to different types of natural disasters, which cause extensive damages to these areas. In the current study, for the protection of the urban environment, a unique approach of...

A comprehensive landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) should be produced to reduce damages to individuals and infrastructures. In the international landslide literature, various statistical methods such as logistic regression (LR) and frequency ratio (FR) have been widely used individually for LSM. However, these methods have some weaknesses. This...

On November 25, 2009, heavy amount of rainfall precipitated in the city of Jeddah that led to floods causing unexpected loss of life (113 person died), and damaged public and private properties (10,000 cars were damaged/destroyed, and many houses, roads, highways, and industrial properties were also affected). The city of Jeddah is located within a...

Efforts to map the distribution of debris flows, to assess the factors controlling their development, and to identify the areas susceptible to their occurrences are often hampered by the paucity of monitoring systems and historical databases in many parts of the world. In this paper, we develop and successfully apply methodologies that rely heavily...

Mountain areas in the southern western corner of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia frequently suffer from various types of landslides due to rain storms and anthropogenic activities. To resolve the problem related to landslides, landslide susceptibility map is important as a quick and safe mitigation measure and to help making strategic planning by ident...

The Al-Hada highway that descends towards the west of the city of At-Taif is a major connecting highway in the western part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is one of the series of descending roads connecting the holy city of Makkah and the city of Jeddah with the city of At-Taif and the cities farther south along the escarpment. The length of th...

The Saudi Arabia has harsh environmental conditions which enhance some geomorphologic/geological processes more than in other areas. These processes create different geological hazards. The general physiography of the Saudi Arabia is characterized by the Red Sea coastal plains and the escarpment foothills called Tihama, followed by the Arabian Shie...

Serious geological hazards have been recognized in the new development urban areas and road construction in west of El- Kawamel area, Sohag, Egypt. These geological problems are due to the presence of sand dunes, sand sheets, and sand accumulations. Three different types of sand dunes, sand sheets, and sand accumulations have been detected includin...

Different types of sinkholes have been recognized in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The sinkholes are of various sizes and shapes and occur at different depths. Their presence may create a direct risk to the infrastructural facilities such as urban areas, roads, future development areas, and farmlands. Recently, more than eight sinkholes have collaps...

Karst phenomena exist in different areas in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, causing serious environmental problems that affect urban development and infrastructure (buildings, roads and highways). One of the most important problems are sinkholes, which most of the time consist of unfilled voids. These sinkholes are formed as a result of the chemical l...

The Raidah Escarpment road is located north west of Abha city, Asir region, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This escarpment road represents an important corridor in the area which connects different villages and tourist resorts with each other. The total length of this road section is about 9 km which passes through a highly mountainous area. The road als...

The Missouri Rock Fall Hazard Rating System (MORFH RS) was recently developed for the State of Missouri. It is a system that separates the risk of failure from the consequences of failure factors, thus allowing better assessment of the hazards of rock falls. Efficiency is gained by video logging of highway rock cuts from vehicles moving at highway...

The present study is destined to measure the nitrate levels of groundwater in Sohag Governorate aiming to determine their possible sources and evaluate their environmental and health impact. 17% of the analyzed samples have NO 3 -levels go over the MAL. Potentially harmful levels of NO 3 -exceeding nearly four times higher than the maximum allowabl...

Land application is the only currently available technique for sewage wastewater disposal along the Nile Valley in Upper Egypt. Wastewater disposal projects have been established in the lowland desert zone extending between the cultivated floodplain and the Eocene Limestone plateau. The plan is to use the treated wastewater in irrigating woody farm...

The Kelantan River is located in the northeastern part of Peninsular Malaysia and presents a great challenge in terms of long and recurring floods. The recent floods, in the year 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 due to heavy monsoons rainfall have triggered these events along Kelantan River Basin. This paper summarizes the findings of the flood susc...

Urban, industrial, and tourist developments are considered of high priority in Egypt. In the current research, the site suitability investigation for rating the different environmental, geological, and geotechnical conditions facing civil engineering projects were assessed using a geographic information system (GIS) multi-criteria approach. The stu...

The city of Jazan is situated on the eastern flank of the Read Sea and considered as one of the fastest growing cities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This zone attracts a lot of investors for various development projects. Recently, many new projects have been implemented and constructed in this region including new urban areas, infrastructures, an...