Oman is vulnerable to flooding, cyclones, sand and dust storms, and drought.
This section allows you to explore the susceptibility of livelihoods and natural systems to impacts of climate variability and change and facilitate the exploration of socioeconomic and development data and its relationships with natural hazards vulnerable areas
The charts provide overview of the most frequent natural disaster in a given country and understand the impacts of those disasters on human populations.
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Climate change is now recognized to have a significant impact on disaster management efforts and pose a significant threat to the efforts to meet the growing needs of the most vulnerable populations. The demands of disaster risk management are such that concise, clear, and reliable information is crucial. The information presented here offers insight into the frequency, impact and occurrence of natural hazards. Source (PDF)
Understanding natural hazard occurrence as well as historical climate conditions, in relation to development contexts, is critical to understanding a country’s historical vulnerability. This tool allows the visualization of different natural hazards or historical climate conditions with socio-economic and development datasets. Select the Development Context and either a Natural Hazard or Climate Condition and overlay horizontally by sliding the toggle left or right to gain a broader sense of historically vulnerable areas.
Data presented under Historical Climate Conditions are reanalysis products derived from ERA5-Land data. ERA5-Land is a global land-surface dataset at 9 km resolution, consistent with atmospheric data from the ERA5 reanalysis from 1950 onward. Climate reanalyses combine past observations with models to generate consistent time series of multiple climate variables. They provide a comprehensive description of the observed climate as it has evolved during recent decades, on 3D grids at sub-daily intervals.
This data has been collected, aggregated and processed by the Climate Resilience Cluster of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Earth Observation for Sustainable Development (EO4SD) initiative.
- Rainfall in winter tends to be sudden with short bursts that cause flash flooding. Seasonal heavy rains and cyclones also result in flooding, causing serious damage to urban settlements and infrastructure.
- Oman has, in recent years, witnessed some of the worst sand and dust storms on record, which are mainly caused by summer winds and mostly affect the desert and interior dry lands during droughts.
- Oman’s climate is characterized by low and erratic rainfall, high temperatures and occasional storms that result in drifting of sand, desert encroachment and soil erosion, which lead to drought conditions.
- In the recent past, Oman has experienced a number of destructive floods and the Sultanate’s capital Muscat has been one of the most impacted areas during heavy rainfall and strong wave events.
- Overgrazing mainly to the south is also accelerating desertification, which is most acute in the Batinah, Sharqiyah and Salalah regions. Excessive grazing by camels is responsible for the disappearance of greenery in some areas of Salalah.
More information on natural hazards can be found at ThinkHazard.
- Increase in sea level and floods might increase coastal erosion, affecting people and marine ecosystems along the coast.
- Increased over-extraction of groundwater may increase saline intrusion.
- Salinity increase in wells and surface irrigation are likely to limit agricultural production.
- Increase in temperatures along with a decrease in rainfall might lead to more severe droughts.