This paper examines the long-term trends of streamflow, rainfall and temperature over the Dinder and Rahad River basins. Streamflow of the Rahad River showed significant increasing trends in both the annual and seasonal flows. There was no detectable change in the mean annual and seasonal flow patterns of the Dinder. However, the analysis of seasonal maxima suggested a shift towards decreased flows during the high flow period (August) and increased flows during the low flow period (November). The Dinder maxima of August decreased from 517 m³/s over the early part of the record (1972–1991) to 396 m³/s over the latest years (1992–2011). The mean annual temperature showed significant increasing trends at the rate of 0.24 and 0.30°C/decade in the examined stations. Rainfall showed no significant change. The result of this study suggests other factors than climate variability (e.g., land use and land cover changes) to be responsible for streamflow alterations.

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The concept of integrated water resource management (IWRM) attempts to integrate all elements of water resources. Different tools are developed to assist in developing sound IWRM plans. One such tool is multiobjective analysis using an integrated hydro-economic model (IHEM). However, IHEM mainly deals with the optimization of river flow (blue water) in a river basin. This paper linked a distributed model of green water (landscape water uses) in the upper catchment with mainly blue water uses in the lower catchment of the Pangani Basin. The results show that agricultural water use has the highest water productivity and competes with all other objective functions in the catchment. The generation of firm energy competes with the downstream ecosystem requirements. The integrated study shows that improving rainfed cropping through supplementary irrigation has comparable marginal water values to full-scale irrigation but are much higher compared with hydropower. However, hydropower has more benefits if used in conjunction with the environment. The methodological approach has increased the understanding of trade-offs between green and blue water uses that are highly interdependent in African landscapes.

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The Eastern Nile Basin is facing a number of transboundary issues, including water resources development, and the associated impacts. The Nile Basin, particularly the Eastern Nile Sub-basin, is considered as one of a few international river systems of potential conflicts between riparian countries. The Eastern Nile is characterized by the high dependency of downstream countries on river water generated in upstream countries, with limited or no contribution to the runoff itself. The aim of this paper is to analyze optimal scenarios for water resources management in the Eastern Nile with regard to hydropower generation and irrigation development. A hydro-economic optimization model based on Genetic Algorithm has been used to determine the maximum benefits for two scenarios: (i) non-cooperative management of hydraulic infrastructure by the riparian countries (status quo), and (ii) cooperative water resources management among the riparian countries. The hydro-economic model is developed using a Genetic Algorithm and deterministic optimization approach covering all hydraulic infrastructures in the Eastern Nile, existing and planned, including the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). The results show that cooperative management yields an increase in hydro-energy returns for all countries compared to the status quo, with a very high increase in Ethiopian's returns, as expected. Non-cooperative system management would negatively impact the hydro-energy of Egypt compared to the cooperative management (reduced by 11%), without a significant increase of hydro-energy for Ethiopia. For Sudan, the results show that hydropower generation benefits from the presence of GERD, in both management scenarios. Non-cooperative management of the system, along with the internal trade-off between irrigation and hydropower facilities, would negatively impact irrigation supply in Sudan. The findings support the argument of positive impact of GERD development on the three Eastern Nile riparian countries, Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt, provided that the three countries agree to manage the system cooperatively.

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The spatiotemporal variability of the Land Use/Cover (LULC) is a strong influence on the land management and hydrological processes of a river basin. In particular in semi-arid regions like the Tekeze-Atbara (T-A) basin, accurate information about LULC change is a prerequisite for improved land and water management. The human-induced landscape transformations in the T-A basin, one of the main tributaries of the Nile River, were investigated for the last four decades (1972–2014). Separate LULC maps for the years 1972, 1989, 2001, and 2014 were developed based on satellite images, Geographic Information System (GIS) and ground information. Change detection analysis based on the transitional probability matrix was applied to identify systematic transitions among the LULC categories. The results show that > 72% of the landscape has changed its category during the past 43 years. LULC in the basin experienced significant shifts from one category to other categories by 61%, 47%, and 45%, in 1972–1989, 1989–2001, and 2001–2014, respectively. Although both net and swap (simultaneous gain and loss of a given LULC during a certain period) change occurred, the latter is more dominant. Natural vegetation cover, including forests, reduced drastically with the rapid expansion of crops, grazing areas and bare lands during the first two decades. However, vegetation started to recover since the 1990s, when some of the agricultural and bare lands have turned into vegetated areas. Forest land showed a continuous decreasing pattern, however, it has increased by 28% in the last period (2001–2014). In contrast, plantation trees have increased by 254% in the last three decades. The increase of vegetation cover is a result of intensive watershed management programs during the last two decades. The driving forces of changes were also discussed and rapid population growth and changing government policies were found to be the most important.

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The Eastern Nile riparian countries are currently developing several reservoir projects to contribute to the needs for energy and food production in the region. In the absence of formal mechanisms for collaboration, the transboundary nature of the Eastern Nile basin makes water resources development challenging. The large seasonal and interannual variability of the river flow increases those challenges. This paper assesses the implications of water resources development in the Eastern Nile basin on water availability for hydropower generation and irrigation demands at country and regional levels, using simulation and scenario analysis methods. Twelve scenarios are used to test developments of several dams and irrigation demands, Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) operation options, and unilateral (status quo) versus integrated transboundary management of dams. A RIBASIM model that included 20 dams and 21 irrigation schemes was built, using a complete data set of 103 years at a monthly time step. Four indicators have been used for evaluating the performance of the system: hydroenergy generation (MWh=year), reliability of irrigation supply (%), reservoir net evaporation (10⁶ m³/year), and flow regimes of rivers (m³/s). The results show that in case of managing the system in an integrated transboundary manner and without new irrigation development projects, GERD would increase the hydroenergy generation in Ethiopia by + 1,500% and in Sudan by + 17%, with a slight reduction in Egypt of -1%. Supply reliability of existing and planned irrigation schemes in Sudan would not be practically influenced by the GERD, but the reliability will be reduced by about 8% when upstream development and new irrigation expansion materialize. Full development of the Eastern Nile basin would reduce the irrigation supply reliability in Egypt to 92% compared to the base scenario (100%). Compared to integrated management, unilateral management would increase the hydroenergy generation in Ethiopia (+16%), increase the rate of evaporation losses in the basin (+15%), and reduce the irrigation supply reliability in Sudan after full development of dams and irrigation projects (-10%). Water resources development would have considerable but varying effects on the countries.

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The limitation in quantity and quality of climate data, in particular rainfall measurements, directly affects the reliability of hydrological models, which negatively impacts on the quality of water resources planning and management. This is obviously true in poorly-gauged or in transboundary river catchments with limited practice of data sharing among the riparian states. Satellite-based and reanalysis rainfall products are increasingly recognised as a promising information source to supplement ground observations. This research aims to study the feasibility of using satellite-based and reanalysis rainfall data for rainfall-runoff modelling in the Sre Pok catchment-a poorly gauged catchment located in Vietnam and Cambodia. First, three selected rainfall products (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission-TRMM, CPC MORPHing Technique-CMORPH, and European Reanalysis-ERA-Interim) were compared against ground rainfall data of 13 rain-gauges, located inside and in the vicinity of the study catchment. The validation results show that the studied global datasets have a reasonably good correlation with ground observation at monthly time scale (NSE = 0.3 to 0.8, R2 = 0.4 to 0.8), but relatively poor correlation at daily scale (NSE = −0.4 to 0.3, R2 = 0.1 to 0.4). Next, a semi-distributed rainfall-runoff model based on HBV-Light was developed to validate these datasets in the Krong Ana sub-catchment of the Sre Pok. The results illustrate satisfactory to very good model performances at monthly time scale for the satellite-based and reanalysis rainfall inputs (NSE = 0.58 to 0.77, R2 = 0.59 to 0.78 for the calibration period from 2004 to 2007, while NSE = 0.59 to 0.80, R2 = 0.64 to 0.84 for the validation period from 2008 to 2010). However, only TRMM and ERA-Interim give acceptable results at daily scale with NSE = 0.52 to 0.67, R2 = 0.53 to 0.67 for the calibration period, and NSE = 0.41 to 0.61, R2 = 0.45 to 0.65 for the validation period. The study concludes that the tested satellite-based and reanalysis rainfall products, especially TRMM and ERA-Interim, could mimic reasonably well the monthly rainfall pattern in the study region. It also demonstrates a great opportunity to use satellite-based and reanalysis rainfall for runoff modelling at monthly time scale in the Sre Pok catchment and other poorly-gauged (transboundary) catchments in the region, for example in the Mekong and Red River Basins.@en

Scarcity of information on the water productivity of different water, land, and other ecosystems in Africa, hampers the optimal allocation of the limited water resources. This study presents an innovative method to quantify the spatial variability of biomass production, crop yield, and economic water productivity, in a data scarce landscape of the Pangani Basin. For the first time, gross return from carbon credits and other ecosystem services are considered, in the concept of Economic Water Productivity. The analysis relied on the MODIS satellite data of 250 m and eight-day resolutions, and the SEBAL model, utilizing Monteith's framework for ecological production. In agriculture, irrigated sugarcane and rice achieved the highest water productivities in both biophysical and economic values. Rainfed and supplementary irrigated banana and maize productivities were significantly lower than the potential values, reflecting a wide spatial variability. In natural landscapes, forest and wetland showed the highest biomass production. However, the transition to economic productivity was low but showed the potential to increase significantly when non-market goods and services were considered. Spatially explicit information, from both biophysical and economic water productivity, provides a holistic outlook of the socio-environmental and the economic water values of a land-use activity, and can identify areas for improvement, and trade-offs in river basins.

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Satellite rainfall products are an important source of rainfall data in un-gauged catchments. However, these products need to be validated as their accuracy can be affected by geographical position, topography, climate and embedded algorithms. Eight satellite rainfall products such as African Rainfall Climatology (ARC2), Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPs), Global Precipitation Climatology Project GPCP), CPC Morphic technique (CMorph), Atmospheric Administration Climate Prediction Center (NOAA-CPC) merged analysis (CMap), Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks (PERSIANN), African Rainfall Estimation Algorithm version 2 (RFEv2) and Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) were evaluated against ground observations over the complex topography of the upper Tekeze-Atbara basin in Ethiopia. The accuracy of the datasets was evaluated at different temporal and larger spatial scales over the period 2002–2015. The results show that the rainfall data of CHIRPS outperformed all other products at all temporal and spatial scales. Next to CHIRPS, estimates from RFEv2, 3B42v7, and PERSIANN products are closest to the measurements at rain gauges for all spatiotemporal scales: daily, monthly and seasonal, and both at point and spatial scales. The percentage bias (PBias) and correlation coefficient (r) of these products were within ±25% and >0.5 for all scales. The remaining products performed poorly with PBias up to 200% and lower r (<0.5) at all scales. However, the performance of all products improved as the temporal scale increased to month and season at all spatial scales. Compared to low altitudes <2000 m above sea level (m.a.s.l.), the PBias at high altitude (>3000 m.a.s.l.) increased by 35% whilst r dropped by 28%. CHIRPS and 3B42v7 products showed best agreement in mountainous terrains. However, all datasets show no consistency of the error sign. CMorph and 3B42v7 consistently overestimate rainfall relative to all rain gauges during the pixel-to-point rainfall comparison approach and at lowland areas during the areal averaged rainfall comparison. The other six products showed a clear underestimation at all spatial scales. In summary, the results show that rainfall estimates by CHIRPS, RFEv2 and 3B42v7 have a consistently better agreement with ground rainfall at all spatiotemporal scales. Considering the complex topography and limited gauges, the performance of CHIRPS, RFEv2 and 3B42v7 indicates that these products can be used for hydrological and overall water management applications in the region.@en

Sediment accumulation hampers optimal water resources management of reservoirs. In the Roseires Reservoir across the Blue Nile River, in Sudan, about 30% of the storage capacity has been lost by sedimentation before dam heightening (2012), despite regular sediment sluicing and flushing. At the same time, increasing soil erosion in the upper river basin in Ethiopia is significantly reducing land productivity.

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Understanding the land use and land cover changes (LULCCs) and their implication on surface hydrology of the Dinder and Rahad basins (D&R, approximately 77 504 km2) is vital for the management and utilization of water resources in the basins. Although there are many studies on LULCC in the Blue Nile Basin, specific studies on LULCC in the D&R are still missing. Hence, its impact on streamflow is unknown. The objective of this paper is to understand the LULCC in the Dinder and Rahad and its implications on streamflow response using satellite data and hydrological modelling. The hydrological model has been derived by different sets of land use and land cover maps from 1972, 1986, 1998 and 2011. Catchment topography, land cover and soil maps are derived from satellite images and serve to estimate model parameters. Results of LULCC detection between 1972 and 2011 indicate a significant decrease in woodland and an increase in cropland. Woodland decreased from 42 to 14 % and from 35 to 14 % for Dinder and Rahad, respectively. Cropland increased from 14 to 47 % and from 18 to 68 % in Dinder and Rahad, respectively. The model results indicate that streamflow is affected by LULCC in both the Dinder and the Rahad rivers. The effect of LULCC on streamflow is significant during 1986 and 2011. This could be attributed to the severe drought during the mid-1980s and the recent large expansion in cropland.

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