Although estuarine locations provide natural safety and protection for the construction of harbours and other infrastructure, they are prone to natural filling due to sediment settlement. As a result, dredging is required regularly to keep navigation channels and harbours safe and functional. A numerical model has been developed in this study to compute annual sediment load in Khour Al-Zubair Port, South of Iraq, setting up a MIKE 21 FM model. MIKE 21 FM was developed by the Danish Hydraulic Institute (DHI) where provides the capability of simulation of a hydrodynamic model (HD) coupled with the mud transport model (MT). The model operates with an unstructured mesh of triangles and quadrilateral elements of different sizes. Field and experimental data were provided during two periods (Neap and Spring) for calibration and verification process. According to the sensitivity analysis results, it is clear that the settling velocity is an essential parameter. Based on the results of the calibrated model, there is annual sedimentation of 1220500.64 tons/year. The primary deposition took place in the meandering of the Khour Al-Zubair estuary and behind the piers.

The port of Khour Al-Zubair is located 60.0 km south of the city centre of Basrah; it is also located 105.0 kilometres from the northern tip of the Arabian Gulf. The main goal of this paper is to estimate the concentration of suspended deposit (SSC) in "Khour Al-Zubair" port using a Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP) based on hydraulic and local boundary parameters while also studying the effect of these parameters on estimating the SSC. Five input parameters (channel width, water depth, discharge, cross-section area, and flow velocity) are used for estimating SSC. Different input hydraulic and local boundary parameter combinations in the three sections (port center, port south, and port north) were used for creating nine models. The use of both hydraulic and local boundary parameters for SSC estimation is very important in the port area for estimating sediment loads without the need for field measurements, which require effort and time.

Recently, methods have emerged to assess the vulnerability of groundwater to pollution, which has been adopted by many countries that depend on groundwater as an important and supportive resource for surface water to protect groundwater and monitor and control its pollution. Assessment methods adopt vulnerability maps and compare them with the real-life pollution map of the region. The study was conducted in Al-Teeb area, which is located in the northeast of Missan province, south of Iraq. This area is about 2450 km2. This study applied four models DRASTIC, GOD, SINTACS and Modified DRASTIC of vulnerability maps are analyzed using GIS technique and compared with the reality map which represent the nitrate concentration map as a basic comparison map; in order to choose the closest one with respect to the realistic acting. The results showed that 80.29 % of study area is classified under low vulnerability in DRASTIC method and moderate vulnerability in GOD, SINTACS and MD-DRASTIC which are covered 54.12 %, 83.18 % and 72.35 % of study area respectively. Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to compare the four methods with the nitrate concentration map, where the correlation value for DRASTIC, GOD, SINTACS and MD-DRASTIC was 73.05, 49.79, 83.23 and 87.94 %, respectively. So, the MD-DRASTIC is represented the best technique for evaluating vulnerability map in the study area which can be recommended.