Dessalegn Worku Ayalew

• Water resources (management)
• Land use and food security
• Environmental and climate change
• Agriculture, land use, climate change

• Ethiopia

Funding: DAAD

BSc in Soil Resources and Watershed Management

MSc in Water Engineering

MSc in Mediterranean Forestry and Natural Resources Management

Hydrologist

DAAD

Advancing Hydrological Modeling in the upper Blue Nile, Ethiopia

Water and soil resources are threatened by diverse factors such as climate change, land use change, and water management practices. Understanding changes in these factors and quantifying their impacts on water and soil resources are prerequisites for planning and implementing proper management practices to ensure their sustainability. Hydrological models are tools used to quantify these impacts; however, modeling remains uncertain due to biased input data and issues with model calibration, structure, and parameterization. Hence, advancing hydrological modeling is important and can be achieved by improving the input data. This is especially crucial for developing countries like Ethiopia, which face input data scarcity and quality issues. Therefore, this study aims to advance hydrological modeling through enhanced input data, such as climate, spatial (soil and land use), and hydrological data, to reliably estimate the effects of climate and land use changes on water balance components and sediment yield. The Kessie watershed in Ethiopia’s upper Blue Nile Basin will serve as a case study. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), a semi-distributed hydrological model, will be calibrated and validated using the improved input data. Then, the calibrated and validated SWAT model will be used to simulate future water balance components and sediment yield using a bias-corrected, best-fit ensemble climate model and projected land use change data as inputs. By advancing hydrological modeling, the study aims to equip policymakers and water resource managers with more reliable predictions, enabling proactive measures to address potential challenges arising from climate and land use changes.

First Supervisor: Pro.Dr. Christain Borgemeister

Second Supervioser: Dr. Luna Bharati

Dr. Navneet Kumar