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In the arid Arabian Peninsula, particularly within the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the perception of rainfall has shifted from a natural blessing to a significant challenge for infrastructure and community resilience. The unprecedented storm on 17 April 2024, exposed critical vulnerabilities in the UAE’s urban infrastructure and flood management practices, revealing substantial gaps in handling accumulated precipitation. This study addresses the necessity of updating the Intensity–Duration–Frequency (IDF) curves for the Sharjah Emirate by utilizing recent precipitation data from 2021 to April 2024, alongside previously published 2020 data. By recalibrating the IDF curves based on data from three meteorological stations, this study reveals a substantial increase in rainfall intensities across all durations and return periods. Rainfall intensities increased by an average of 36.76% in Sharjah, 26.52% in Al Dhaid, and 17.55% in Mleiha. These increases indicate a trend towards more severe and frequent rainfall events, emphasizing the urgent need to revise hydrological models and infrastructure designs to enhance flood resilience. This study contributes valuable insights for policymakers, urban planners, and disaster management authorities in the UAE and similar regions worldwide.

This paper focuses on developing a water and energy-saving reliable irrigation system using state-of-the-art computing, communication, and optimal energy management framework. The framework integrates real-time soil moisture and weather forecasting information to decide the time of irrigation and quantity of water required for potato crops, which is made available to the users across a region through the cloud-based irrigation decision support system. This is accomplished through various modules such as data acquisition, soil moisture forecasting, smart irrigation scheduling, and energy management scheme. The main emphasizes is on the electrical segment which demonstrates an energy management scheme for PV-battery based grid-connected system to operate the irrigation system valves and water pump. The proposed scheme is verified through simulation and dSpace-based real-time experiment studies. Overall, the proposed energy management system demonstrates an improvement in the optimal onsite solar power generation and storage capacity to power the solar pump which save the electrical energy as well as the water in order to establish an improved solar-irrigation system. Finally, the proposed system achieved water and energy savings of around 9.24 % for potato crop with full irrigation enhancing the Water-Energy-Food Nexus at field scale.