Arid and semi-arid regions have different spectral characteristics from other climatic regions. Therefore, appropriate remotely sensed indicators of land use and land cover types need to be defined for arid and semi-arid lands, as indices developed for other climatic regions may not give plausible results in arid and semi-arid regions. For instance, the normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) and normalized difference bareness index (NDBaI) are unable to distinguish between built-up areas and bare and dry soil that surrounds many cities in dry climates. This paper proposes the application of two newly developed indices, the dry built-up index (DBI) and dry bare-soil index (DBSI) to map built-up and bare areas in a dry climate from Landsat 8. The developed DBI and DBSI were applied to map urban areas and bare soil in the city of Erbil, Iraq. The results show an overall classification accuracy of 93% (κ = 0.86) and 92% (κ = 0.84) for DBI and DBSI, respectively. The results indicate the suitability of the proposed indices to discriminate between urban areas and bare soil in arid and semi-arid climates.

The growth of urban areas has a significant impact on land use by replacing areas of vegetation with residential and commercial areas and their related infrastructure; this escalates the land surface temperature (LST). Rapid urban growth has occurred in Duhok City due to enhanced political and economic growth during the period of this study. The objective is to investigate the effect of land use changes on LST; this study depends on data from three Landsat images (two Landsat 5-TM and Landsat OLI_TIRS-8) from 1990, 2000 and 2016. Supervised classification was used to compute land use/cover categories, and to generate the land surface temperature (LST) maps the Mono-window algorithm was used. Images were also used to create the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), normalized difference built-up index (NDBI), normalized difference bareness index (NDBAI) and normalized difference water index (NDWI) maps. Linear regression analysis was used to generate relationships between LST with NDVI, NDBI, NDBAI and NDWI. The study outcome proves that the changes in land use/cover have a significant role in the escalation of land surface temperatures. The highest temperatures are associated with barren land and built-up areas, ranging from 47°C, 50°C, 56°C while lower temperatures are related to water bodies and forests, ranging from 25°C, 26°C, 29°C respectively, in 1990, 2000 and 2016. This study also proves that NDVI and NDWI correlate negatively with low temperatures while NDBI and NDBAI correlate positively with high temperatures.

The Middle East is an inherently dry zone. It has experienced severe drought for the last seven years, and climate change has made the situation worse. The Dohuk governorate has been suffering from an appalling water crisis. One possible way of relieving this water crisis is by properly harvesting the rainwater. Rainwater harvesting is a widely used method of storing rainwater in the countries presenting with drought characteristics. Several pieces of research have derived and developed different criteria and techniques to select suitable sites for harvesting rainwater. The main aim of this research was to identify and select suitable sites for the potential erection of dams, as well as to derive a model builder in ArcMap 10.4.1. The model combined several parameters, such as slope, runoff potential, land cover/use, stream order, soil quality, and hydrology to determine the suitability of the site for harvesting rainwater. To compute the land use/cover categories, the study depended on Landsat image data from 2018. Supervised classification was applied using the ENVI 5 software, while the slope mapping and drainage order were extracted using a digital elevation model. Inverse distance weighting (IDW) was used for the spatial interpolation of the rain data. The results demonstrated that suitable areas for water harvesting, are located in the middle and northern part of the research area, and in intensively cultivated zones. The main soil texture in these suitable sites was loam, while the rainfall rate amounted to 750 to 900 mm. This research shows that 15% and 13% of the area studied can be categorized as having excellent and good suitability for water harvesting, respectively. Furthermore, 21% and 27% of the area studied were of moderate and poor suitability, while the remaining 24% were not suitable at all.

Wildfires have an important role in the ecological process affecting ecosystems at multiple spatial scales. MCD64A1 500 m burned area product is used in this study to document trends of fire events from 2001 to 2019. The research aims to analyze the trend of burned areas in the country. Iraq is selected as study area of the research because of dramatically increasing the number of fires in the country. The study found that the lowest amount of burned areas were located in the center and southwest, while northeast and north faced most of the fires. The trend of burned areas in Iraq was an increase of 71.7 km² per year, and, principally, in the last years, burned areas increased by 1363 km². The most extensive burning areas occurred in the Ninawa Governorate (29%). In 2019, burned areas increased to around eight times compared to the yearly average. During 2019, one of the highest classes which contain burned area is “Cropland, rainfed” with 4366 km² burned. High maximum air temperature and wind speed are the main factors that contribute to increasing burned areas; however, high precipitation and air pressure lead to a reducing amount of burned areas. The rapid increase of fires in the country as a result of burn crop field residues will lead to worsening air pollution and likely decrease forest area in the future.