Flash flooding constitutes one of the most destructive natural hazards in arid environments, where episodic high-intensity rainfall interacts with poorly drained terrain and expanding urban surfaces to produce severe runoff conditions. Kuwait, characterized by low topographic relief, ephemeral drainage systems, and rapid urbanization, faces escalating flood risk compounded by projected urban land cover increases through the twenty-first century. This study presents a territory-wide flood susceptibility assessment integrating GIS-based hydrological analysis of the national drainage network with projected Land Use and Land Cover maps for 2022, 2050, and 2100. The workflow applies Fill, Flow Direction, Flow Accumulation, Basin delineation, Stream Order, and Line Density computation in ArcGIS, supplemented by morphometric characterization of four principal basin systems. The analysis identified 39,979 stream segments totaling approximately 46,677 km, with drainage density between 1.39 and 1.56 km/km², near-zero relief ratios, and mean bifurcation ratios between 2.26 and 2.79 indicating significant runoff concentration along fifth through seventh-order streams. Additional 20-percentile-point assigned to projected urban cells is combined with the stream density surface and rescaled through min-max normalization into ten susceptibility intervals. Results show progressive upward redistribution across scenarios with the very low class contracts from 71.61% at baseline to 63.66% by 2100, while the low-to-moderate class expands from 3.58% to 8.11%. The very high susceptibility class, absent under natural conditions, reaches 0.01% under all urbanized scenarios, identifying critical nodes where maximum drainage concentration and full urban imperviousness converge, with direct implications for infrastructure planning and flood risk governance in Kuwait.
Walid Al-Shaar (Thu,) studied this question.