Synoptic Characteristics of Torrential Rains in Southwest and Southeast Iraq: A Case Study

Abstract

Torrential rains cause many losses in city infrastructure, crops, and deaths in several regions of the world including Iraq as in the case that we will discuss in this work, on January 28 and 29, 2019. Torrential rain caused the flow of torrents in several areas of Iraq and the neighboring areas. This research work aims to identify the synoptic characteristics of torrential rains and the causes of this case. This will be done by analyzing and interpreting the weather maps at different pressure levels with focusing on the troughs and fronts locations, relative vorticity, polar jet stream effect as well as the moisture flux. The Geographic Information System (GIS) was used to analyze the satellite images in order to calculate the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) to confirm the heavy rain case. The weather maps were obtained from the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications Version 2 (MERRA-2).  As for the satellite images we used the satellite imagery from Sentinel-2 and EMUTSAT.