Informations et ressources scientifiques
sur le développement des zones arides et semi-arides

Titre : Hydrologic model of the Mara River Basin

Auteur : Gedefa, Mulugeta Tesema

Université de soutenance : UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft

Grade : Master of Science (MS) 2021

Résumé partiel
The Mara River Basin is one of the international drainage basins that adjoin Lake Victoria. It covers an area of 13,750 km2 and is located in South-West Kenya and North-West Tanzania. The highest elevation of the basin, where the Mara River originates is about 3,062 m above sea level and the main river begins from the confluence point of two perennial tributaries, the Nyangores and Amala Rivers. The direct impact of population growth in the area is resulting in over abstraction of water resources due to increase in human interventions. This brings the river water provision reliability in question unless proper estimation and assessment of water resources is being made. Besides these human interventions, the currently available monitoring stations do not provide sufficient quality data and some stations provide only recent data. This results in lack of understanding of the hydrological behaviour and the distribution of the water resources in the basin and its sub basins. This thesis aims to assess the temporal-spatial water resources relationships and hydrological responses, and the water resources distribution in the various parts of the Mara River Basin. Specifically, a hydrological model was built to simulate the natural rainfall runoff patterns for existing stations and to provide estimates of these patterns for ungauged parts of the basin, which allows to assess the available water resources through water balance estimations. The Hydrologic Modelling System from the Hydrologic Engineering Centre (HEC-HMS) coupled with GIS was applied for this study. The model uses meteorological, hydrological and spatial data to calculate the water storage and the runoff as hydrologic cycle components for specified catchments in the river basin. Seven meteorological stations and four stream gauging stations were selected considering the area coverage and the data period they covered. The DEM was pre-processed to generate the stream drainage network for the project using the ArcHydro tool box

Sujets  : hydrological modelling Mara River Basin rainfall-runoff modelling land use land cover climate change basin modelling data-driven modelling

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