As green hydrogen emerges as a major component of global decarbonisation, Oman has positioned itself strategically through national auctions and international partnerships. Following two successful green hydrogen project rounds, the country launched its third auction (R3) in the Duqm region. While this area exhibits relative geospatial homogeneity, it is still vulnerable to environmental fluctuations that pose inherent risks to productivity. Despite growing global investment in green hydrogen, operational data remains scarce, with major projects like Saudi Arabia's NEOM facility not expected to commence production until 2026, and Oman's ACME Duqm project scheduled for 2028. This absence of historical maintenance and performance data from large-scale hydrogen facilities in desert environments creates a major knowledge gap for accurate risk assessment for infrastructure planning and auction decisions. Given this data void, environmental conditions emerge as accessible and reliable proxy for predicting infrastructure maintenance pressures, because harsh desert conditions such as dust storms, extreme temperatures, and humidity fluctuations are well-documented drivers of equipment degradation in renewable energy systems. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an Artificial Intelligence decision support system that leverages publicly available meteorological data to develop a predictive Maintenance Pressure Index (MPI), which predicts risk levels and future maintenance demands on hydrogen infrastructure. This tool strengthens regulatory foresight and operational decision-making by enabling temporal benchmarking to assess and validate performance claims over time. It can be used to incorporate temporal risk intelligence into auction evaluation criteria despite the absence of historical operational benchmarks.

As nations seek sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels, green hydrogen has emerged as a promising strategic pathway toward decarbonisation, particularly in solar-rich arid regions. However, identifying optimal locations for hydrogen production requires the integration of complex environmental, atmospheric, and infrastructural factors, often compounded by limited availability of direct hydrogen yield data. This study presents a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework for computing green hydrogen yield and site suitability index using mean absolute SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) values. This framework consists of a multi-stage pipeline of unsupervised multi-variable clustering, supervised machine learning classifier and SHAP algorithm. The pipeline trains on an integrated meteorological, topographic and temporal dataset and the results revealed distinct spatial patterns of suitability and relative influence of the variables. With model predictive accuracy of 98%, the result also showed that water proximity, elevation and seasonal variation are the most influential factors determining green hydrogen site suitability in Oman with mean absolute shap values of 2.470891, 2.376296 and 1.273216 respectively. Given limited or absence of ground-truth yield data in many countries that have green hydrogen prospects and ambitions, this study offers an objective and reproducible alternative to subjective expert weightings, thus allowing the data to speak for itself and potentially discover novel latent groupings without pre-imposed assumptions. This study offers industry stakeholders and policymakers a replicable and scalable tool for green hydrogen infrastructure planning and other decision making in data-scarce regions.

Land cover and land use (LULC) changes are key applications of satellite imagery, and they have critical roles in resource management, urbanization, protection of soils and the environment, and enhancing sustainable development. The literature has heavily utilized multispectral spatiotemporal satellite data alongside advanced machine learning algorithms to monitor and predict LULC changes. This study analyzes and compares LULC changes across various governorates (provinces) of the Sultanate of Oman from 2016 to 2021 using annual time steps. For the chosen region, multispectral spatiotemporal data were acquired from the open-source Sentinel-2 satellite dataset. Supervised machine learning algorithms were used to train and classify different land covers, such as water bodies, crops, urban, etc. The constructed model was subsequently applied within the study region, allowing for an effective comparative evaluation of LULC changes within the given timeframe.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The U.S. Navy sailed its first drone boat through the strategic Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, a crucial waterway for global energy supplies where American sailors often faces tense encounters with Iranian forces. The trip by the L3 Harris Arabian Fox MAST-13, a 41-foot speedboat carrying sensors and cameras, drew the attention of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, but took place without incident, said Navy spokesman Cmdr. Two U.S. Coast Guard cutters, the USCGC Charles Moulthrope and USCGC John Scheuerman, accompanied the drone.

Netanyahu spoke to Fox News Digital following the release of his new memoir, "Bibi: My Story." Officials in Israel say Iran is responsible for a drone strike that hit an Israel-associated, Liberian-flagged oil tanker off the coast of Oman on Tuesday. The tanker, the Pacific Zircon, sustained minor damage to its hull with no injuries or spillage of the gas oil cargo, Israeli-controlled Eastern Pacific Shipping said Wednesday, and an Israeli official said Iran was responsible. Three maritime sources told Reuters that a drone was suspected to have attacked the tanker. An Israeli official said Iran was responsible for the attack by using a Shahed-136 drone, the type it has been supplying to Russia for use in its war against Ukraine.

Israel blamed Iran on Wednesday after what it said was a drone strike hit a tanker operated by an Israeli-owned firm carrying gas oil off the coast of Oman. The Pacific Zircon was "hit by a projectile approximately 150 miles off the coast of Oman ... on 15 November," Singapore-based firm Eastern Pacific Shipping which operates the vessel said in a statement, adding that there were no reports of casualties or any leakage of the cargo. "There is some minor damage to the vessel's hull but no spillage of cargo or water ingress," said the company which is owned by Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer -- one of two sons of shipping magnate Sammy Ofer, who died in 2011. The tanker was carrying 42,000 tonnes of gas oil and bound for Buenos Aires, according to Samir Madani, co-founder of website TankerTrackers.com, The Bahrain-based United States Fifth Fleet said it was "aware of the incident".

The United States said Wednesday it suspected Iranian involvement in the alleged hijacking of a ship in the Gulf of Oman as it vowed to work with Britain to respond to an earlier deadly attack it blamed on Tehran. Oman said that the Asphalt Princess, an asphalt and bitumen tanker, was involved in "a hijacking incident in international waters" and that it deployed aircraft and naval ships. The United States and Britain said that the murky incident in the Gulf of Oman concluded after one day, with the alleged hijackers leaving the Panamanian-flagged vessel. "We believe that these personnel were Iranian, but we're not in a position to confirm this at this time," State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters in Washington. "Iran has undertaken a pattern of belligerence in terms of proxy attacks in the region and of course, these maritime attacks," Price said, while adding that circumstances in the latest incident were "still emerging".

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – The United States has joined the United Kingdom and Israel in accusing Iran of carrying out a deadly drone strike that killed two aboard a tanker off Oman. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made the announcement in a statement Sunday. Blinken said: "Upon review of the available information, we are confident that Iran conducted this attack, which killed two innocent people, using one-way explosive (drones), a lethal capability it is increasingly employing throughout the region." He added that there was "no justification for this attack, which follows a pattern of attacks and other belligerent behavior."

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) -- A pair of B-52 bombers flew over the Mideast on Sunday, the latest such mission in the region aimed at warning Iran amid tensions between Washington and Tehran. The flight by the two heavy bombers came as a pro-Iran satellite channel based in Beirut broadcast Iranian military drone footage of an Israeli ship hit by a mysterious explosion only days earlier in the Mideast. While the channel sought to say Iran wasn't involved, Israel has blamed Tehran for what it described as an attack on the vessel. The U.S. military's Central Command said the two B-52s flew over the region accompanied by military aircraft from nations including Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It marked the fourth-such bomber deployment into the Mideast this year and the second under President Joe Biden.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – A flurry of diplomatic visits and meetings crisscrossing the Persian Gulf have driven urgent efforts in recent days to defuse the possibility of all-out war after the U.S. killed Iran's top military commander. Global leaders and top diplomats are repeating the mantra of "de-escalation" and "dialog," yet none has publicly laid out a path to achieving either. The United States and Iran have said they do not want war, but fears have grown that the crisis could spin out of Tehran's or Washington's control. Tensions have careened from one crisis to another since President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from Iran's nuclear deal with world powers. The U.S. drone strike that killed Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani and a senior Iraqi militia leader in Baghdad on Jan. 3 was seen as a major provocation.