Potential impacts of urban area expansion on groundwater level in the Gaza Strip: a spatial-temporal assessment

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 10565-10584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamer Eshtawi ◽  
Mariele Evers ◽  
Bernhard Tischbein
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hassan Al-Najjar ◽  
Gokmen Ceribasi ◽  
Emrah Dogan ◽  
Khalid Qahman ◽  
Mazen Abualtayef ◽  
...  

Abstract The water supply in the Gaza Strip substantially depends on the groundwater resource of the Gaza coastal aquifer. The climate changes and the over-exploiting processes negatively impact the recovery of the groundwater balance. The climate variability is characterized by the decline in the precipitation by −5.2% and an increase in the temperature by +1 °C in the timeframe of 2020–2040. The potential evaporation and the sunshine period are expected to increase by about 111 mm and 5 hours, respectively, during the next 20 years. However, the atmosphere is predicted to be drier where the relative humidity will fall by a trend of −8% in 20 years. The groundwater abstraction is predicted to increase by 55% by 2040. The response of the groundwater level to climate change and groundwater pumping was evaluated using a model of a 20-neuron ANN with a performance of the correlation coefficient (r)=0.95–0.99 and the root mean square error (RMSE)=0.09–0.21. Nowadays, the model reveals that the groundwater level ranges between −0.38 and −18.5 m and by 2040 it is expected to reach −1.13 and −28 m below MSL at the northern and southern governorates of the Gaza Strip, respectively.


Author(s):  
Hassan Al-Najjar ◽  
Gokmen Ceribasi ◽  
Emrah Dogan ◽  
Khalid Qahman ◽  
Mazen Abualtayef ◽  
...  

The Gaza coastal aquifer is a critical resource for the supply of water to the Gaza Strip and continues to be depleted as a result of the effects of climate change and the anthropogenic activities. Therefore, this study tends to investigate the impact of climate change and groundwater withdrawal practices on the oscillation of the Gaza Coastal Aquifer water table level by recruiting the power of the stochastic time-series models in exemplifying the autoregression of data and by leveraging the efficiency of the artificial neural networks (ANNs) in expressing the nonlinear regression between the different meteorological and hydrological factors. The climate stochastic models reveal that the Gaza Strip region will face a decline in the precipitation by -5.2% and an increase in the temperature by +1˚C in the timeframe of 2020-2040. The potential evaporation and the sunshine period will increase by about 111 mm and 5 hours, respectively during the next 20 years. However, the atmosphere is predicted to be drier where the relative humidity will fall by a trend of -8% in 20 years. The stochastic models developed for the groundwater abstraction time series show that the groundwater pumping processes would increase by about 55 % by 2040, compared to the 124 million cubic meters of groundwater that was withdrawn in 2020. The stochastic model of structure (2,1,5) (4,1,2)12 was defined to extend the time series of the groundwater level up to 2040. In order to form an integrated stochastic-ANN model, the combination of the time series of climate factors, groundwater abstraction and groundwater level were emerged into a one hidden layer ANN of 20-neurons. The performance of the model was high in term of training and in forecasting the future where the correlation coefficient (r) = 0.95-0.99 and the root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.09-0.21.


1990 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann M. Lesch
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Omar S. Asfour ◽  
Samar Abu Ghali

City centers worldwide are perceived as essential parts of the city, where city memories are preserved and its identity is expressed. They are planned to satisfy the functional requirements and pleasurable qualities of the city. Under the accelerating urbanization of the modern city, several challenges face these centers including demographic, economic, and environmental challenges. This requires a continuous and incremental urban development process based on clear strategy and action plans. Thus, this study focuses on urban development strategies of city centers, with a focus on Rafah city located in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories. The geographic location of this city near the Palestinian-Egyptian borders makes it a promising commercial city at local and regional levels. Thus, the current situation of Rafah city center has been analyzed, and several development strategies have been proposed. This has been done through a field survey based on observation and a questionnaire directed to city center users. It has been found that there is a great potential of Rafah city center to be developed as a commercial center. In this regard, several strategies and required actions have been proposed in the fields of transportation, environmental quality, shopping activities, investment opportunities, and visual perception.


Author(s):  
Maria Grazia Imperiale ◽  
Alison Phipps ◽  
Giovanna Fassetta

AbstractThis article contributes to conversations on hospitality in educational settings, with a focus on higher education and the online context. We integrate Derrida’s ethics of hospitality framework with a focus on practices of hospitality, including its affective and material, embodied dimension (Zembylas: Stud Philos Educ 39:37–50, 2019). This article offers empirical examples of practices of what we termed ‘virtual academic hospitality’: during a series of online collaborative and cross borders workshops with teachers of English based in the Gaza Strip (Palestine), we performed academic hospitality through virtual convivial rituals and the sharing of virtual gifts, which are illustrated here. We propose a revision of the concept of academic hospitality arguing that: firstly, academic hospitality is not limited to intellectual conversations; secondly, that the relationship between hospitality and mobility needs to be revised, since hospitality mediated by the technological medium can be performed, and technology may even stretch hospitality towards the unreachable ‘unconditional hospitality’ theorised by Derrida (Of hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invited Jacques Derrida to respond. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2000); and thirdly, that indigenous epistemics, with their focus on the affective, may offer alternative understandings of conviviality within the academy. These points may contribute to the collective development of a new paradigmatic understanding of hospitality, one which integrates Western and indigenous traditions of hospitality, and which includes the online environment.


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