Spatial study of causes and effects of the sandstorms using meteorological data and GIS: The case of Nasiriyah city, Iraq

The reoccurrence of sandstorms in Nasiriyah city (Southern Iraq) throughout the Summer season is a very important phenomenon and distinctive case that comes from the nearby regions. These storms restrict the financial activities of the city with expanded municipal effort as well as other well-being and environmental problems, and then bring a huge risk to the local residents. This paper uses Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing Imagery to dimensionally discover the reasons causing sandstorms, understand the changes within certain periods of time, and then measure the sand-plume coverage during storms. This work has also made an attempt to get the correlation between meteorological records and spatial outputs to predict the direction and coverage range of the predicted future sandstorms which could help to take protective and preventive measures for the sake of the human being. The periods between 1972 and 2018 have been adopted to study the phenomena by using the information archive of the Nasiriyah Meteorological Center together with NASA's open-source climate data and Landsat satellite imagery.