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The study was aimed to examine the need of incorporating traditional weather forecasting renowned indigenous knowledge system (IKS) into modern weather forecasting methods to be used for planning farming activities. In addition, not only gap that is not infused by current weather forecasting system with their advanced studies to understand why it is incorporated into existing technical frameworks was regarded, but also the limitation of advanced weather forecasting approach and strength to be elicited by indigenous knowledge system are crucial. Perspicuously, forms and onsite interrogates have been conducted to assess people's beliefs, understanding, and attitudes on the indigenous knowledge system significance on weather forecasting. Therefore, atmospheric and biological conditions, astronomic, as well as relief characteristics were used to predict the weather over short and long periods. Usually, in assessing weather conditions, the conduct of animals and insects were listed as essential. Obviously, in order to predict weather particularly from rain within about short period of time, astronomical characteristics were used. Commonly, there are few peers who know conventional weather prediction approaches. This lowers the reliability of conventional weather prediction. The findings revealed some variables that impact meteorological inaccuracy by scientific methods and help to recognize and evaluate the gap that current meteorological technologies do not achieve and new particulars anticipated to be filled with conventional methods to attain accurate weather prediction. Additionally, the study indicated that both modern and conventional processes have certain positive and limitations, which means that they can be coupled to generate more accurate weather prediction reports for end users.

Flooding is one of the catastrophic natural hazards worldwide that can easily cause devastating effects on human life and property. Remote sensing devices are becoming increasingly important in monitoring and assessing natural disaster susceptibility and hazards. The proposed research work pursues an assessment analysis of flood susceptibility in a tropical desert environment: a case study of Yemen. The base data for this research were collected and organized from meteorological, satellite images, remote sensing data, essential geographic data, and various data sources and used as input data into four machine learning (ML) algorithms. In this study, RS data (Sentinel-1 images) were used to detect flooded areas in the study area. We also used the Sentinel application platform (SNAP 7.0) for Sentinel-1 image analysis and detecting flood zones in the study locations. Flood spots were discovered and verified using Google Earth images, Landsat images, and press sources to create a flood inventory map of flooded areas in the study area. Four ML algorithms were used to map flash flood susceptibility (FFS) in Tarim city (Yemen): K-nearest neighbor (KNN), Naïve Bayes (NB), random forests (RF), and eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). Twelve flood conditioning factors were prepared, assessed in multicollinearity, and used with flood inventories as input parameters to run each model. A total of 600 random flood and non-flood points were chosen, where 75% and 25% were used as training and validation datasets. The confusion matrix and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) were used to validate the susceptibility maps. The results obtained reveal that all models had a high capacity to predict floods (AUC > 0.90). Further, in terms of performance, the tree-based ensemble algorithms (RF, XGBoost) outperform other ML algorithms, where the RF algorithm provides robust performance (AUC = 0.982) for assessing flood-prone areas with only a few adjustments required prior to training the model. The value of the research lies in the fact that the proposed models are being tested for the first time in Yemen to assess flood susceptibility, which can also be used to assess, for example, earthquakes, landslides, and other disasters. Furthermore, this work makes significant contributions to the worldwide effort to reduce the risk of natural disasters, particularly in Yemen. This will, therefore, help to enhance environmental sustainability.

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