A New Approach to Modeling Water Balance in Nile River Basin, Africa

Marye Belete, Jinsong Deng, Mengmeng Zhou, Ke Wang, Shixue You, Yang Hong and Melanie Weston
Additional contact information
Marye Belete: College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
Jinsong Deng: College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
Mengmeng Zhou: College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
Ke Wang: College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
Shixue You: College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
Yang Hong: School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences and School of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019, USA
Melanie Weston: College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 3, 1-14

Abstract: The demand for calculating and mapping water yield is increasing for inaccessible locations or areas of conflict to support decision makers. Integrated Valuation of Environmental Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) was applied to simulate basin hydrology. InVEST is becoming popular in the water modeling community due to its low requirements for input information, level of skill and model setup is available to the public domain. Estimation and mapping of water production, evapotranspiration and precipitation of the Nile River Basin have been performed by using open access data. This study utilized climate, soil and land use related data to model the key components of the water balance in the study region. Maps of the key parts of water balance were also produced. The spatial patterns of precipitation, actual evapotranspiration and water yield show sharp decline from south to northern part of the study basin while actual evapotranspiration fraction happens to the opposite. Our analysis confirms the ability of the InVEST water yield model to estimate water production capacity of a different part of a basin without flow meters.

Keywords: Nile Basin; water yield; spatial variation; InVEST; open access data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/3/810/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/3/810/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:3:p:810-:d:136295

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().