A. T. Haile

International Water Management Institute | IWMI · Water resources

Recent advancements in satellite remote sensing have led to increased spatial and temporal resolution of actual eva-potranspiration (AET) estimates across scales. Yet, the accuracy of AET products remains unknown for many regions, prompting further investigation to guide selection. This study intercompares five AET products within Ethiopia's Bilate...

Volume 17 | Issue 2 Mdee, A.; Ofori, A.D.; Cohen, J.; Kjellén, M.; Rooney, E.; Singhal, S.; Amezaga, J.; Ankush; Figueroa-Benítez, A.; Gupta, S.; Tamiru Haile, A.; Haileslassie, A.; Kongo, V.; Kumar, A.; Mafla Noguera, S.A.; Nagheeby, M.; Noor, Z.Z.; Polaine, X.; Singh, N.; Sylvester, R.; Wan Ahmad Tajuddin, W.A.N.; Bin Yusop, Z. and Zúñiga-Barragá...

Precise estimation of irrigated areas is essential for effective water management, increased production, environmental conservation, and conflict resolution. Nonetheless, discrepancies frequently exist between estimated and actual irrigated areas. To address the data gaps in actual irrigation areas within Ethiopia, we utilized high-resolution remot...

An effective flood early warning system is vital to take action to save lives and protect properties in urban areas which are increasingly prone to flooding. Despite substantial progress in flood early warning systems, limited available and accessible data often impede their advancement and reliability. Engaging communities affected by flooding can...

The objectives of the study were to investigate community perception and articulation of diverse and priority water values and examine water value trade-offs in the context of urban–rural interaction. The study applies the socio-ecological system framework and integrates bio-physical and socioeconomic methods into it. These methods include Househol...

Freshwater ecosystems are important for directly ensuring a range of benefits and services that sustain local livelihoods and help mitigate climate change. However, freshwater ecosystems are threatened by anthropogenic and natural pressures affecting their ability to sustainably provide these services. Managing freshwater ecosystems is mainly chall...

Introduction: Cities located in lower income countries are global flood risk hotspots. Assessment and management of these risks forms a key part of global climate adaptation efforts. City scale flood risk assessments necessitate flood hazard information, which is challenging to obtain in these localities because of data quality/scarcity issues, and...

This study evaluates the implications of multiple climatic and non-climatic factors on the water resource of the Lake Tana sub-basin, Ethiopia. The study focuses on three drivers: land use change, irrigation expansion, and climate change (CC), and their impact on the current and future water availability across the sub-basin. The study uses a rando...

Abstract Inadequate representation of flood conditioning factors could affect the accuracy of flood susceptibility prediction (FSP) and the estimation of the associated element within the susceptible areas. The present study examined 28 Earth Observation datasets representing the physical environment and extreme rainfall features of a highly urban...

Lack of consistent streamflow data has been an increasing challenge reported by many studies in developing countries. This study aims to understand the current challenges in streamflow monitoring in Ethiopia to prioritize research topics that can support sustained streamflow monitoring in the country and elsewhere. A workshop-based expert consultat...

Evaluation of the hydrological impact of urbanization-induced land use land cover (LULC) changes for medium to large catchments is still an important research topic due to the lack of evidence to conclude about how local changes translate to impacts across scales. This study aims to provide evidence on the effects of LULC change on the streamflow o...

In the past decade, streamflow data remain inaccessible for most river gauges in Ethiopia due to a lack of updated stage–discharge relationships, also called rating curves. In this study, researchers and hydrologic technicians collaborated to fill the recent streamflow data gaps at three gauging stations in the Lake Tana sub-basin of the Nile River...

Study region: Lake Tana sub-basin of the Upper Blue Nile River Basin, Ethiopia Study focus: Groundwater use for small-scale irrigation is increasing in the Lake Tana sub-basin. However, the abstraction amount and its impact are not well understood. In this study, a new methodological approach was utilized to estimate the irrigation water abstractio...

Study region Akaki is a headwater catchment of Awash River Basin that hosts the capital city of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. The area encompasses several agglomerated towns, water supply, and hydropower reservoirs and is characterized by a chain of mountains and floodplains. Due to basin rainfall, and the expansion of urbanized areas, the catchment is fr...

A lack of water quality information for many water bodies around the world makes it difficult to identify global change and discover early signs of myriad threats to freshwater resources. This problem is widely seen in Ethiopia due to absence of regular monitoring. Citizen science has a great potential to fill these gaps in water quality data, but...

Study region The Akaki catchment is found in the Upper Awash River Basin in Ethiopia. Study focus Understanding the accuracy of rainfall forecasts in the data-scarce urban catchment has a multitude of benefits given the increased urban flood risk caused by climate change and urbanization. In this study, accuracy of the weather research and forecas...

Neurexins (Nrxns) have been extensively studied for their role in synapse organization and have been linked to many neuropsychiatric disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and epilepsy. However, no studies have provided direct evidence that Nrxns may be the key regulator in the shared pathogenesis of these conditions largely due to co...

In 2014, Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) introduced an affordable and portable sequencer called MinION. We reviewed emerging applications in water research and assessed progress made with this platform towards ubiquitous genetics. With >99% savings in upfront costs as compared to conventional platforms, the MinION put sequencing capacity into th...

Citizen Science can fulfill the quest for high-quality and sufficient environmental data, such as rainfall. However, the factors affecting the quality of rainfall data collected by the citizen scientists are not well understood. In this study, we examined the effect of citizen scientists’ attributes on the quality of rainfall data. For this purpose...

Water management has followed a basin unit paradigm for several decades. This framing often inherits a pre-defined spatial and institutional boundary of analysis, one that largely fails to account for various externalities influencing water security beyond the hydrological unit. Moving away from this established basin-scale analysis, we present the...

This study assesses bias error of rainfall from climate models and related error propagation effects to simulated streamflow in the Gidabo sub-basin, Ethiopia. Rainfall is obtained from a combination of four global and regional climate models (GCM-RCMs), and streamflow is simulated by means of the Hydrologiska Byråns Vattenbalansavdelning (HBV-96)...

Climate change impact studies that evaluated the biases of climate models' simulations showed the presence of large systematic errors in their outputs. However, many studies continue to arbitrarily select bias correction methods for error reduction. This work evaluated the implications of bias correction methods on the projections of climate change...

Over the last two decades, several data sets have been developed to assess flood risk at the global scale. In recent years, some of these data sets have become detailed enough to be informative at national scales. The use of these data sets nationally could have enormous benefits in areas lacking existing flood risk information and allow better flo...

ABSTRACT Poor availability and accuracy of streamflow data constrains research and operational hydrology. We evaluated the status of forty streamflow stations and data quality in the Omo-Gibe basin, Ethiopia. The method included a 3-week field inspection of the stations. Inspection of stations followed common WMO guidelines for appropriate gauging...

The Sentinel-1 SAR dataset provides the opportunity to monitor floods at unprecedentedly high spatial and temporal resolutions. However, the accuracy of the flood maps can be affected by the image polarization, the flood detection method used, and the reference data. This research compared change detection and histogram thresholding methods using c...

The Lake Tana sub-basin is one of the agricultural growth corridors for Ethiopia’s plan to expand irrigation. Subsequent uncontrolled water withdrawals in the sub-basin pose concerns of potential conflicts, water scarcity, and environmental damage.

In Addis Ababa and its environs, most urban wastewater is discharged into rivers without treatment. This study related urban wastewater characteristics to the prevalence of faecal, antibiotic resistant, and potentially pathogenic bacteria in rivers of the Akaki catchment across six locations, for the dry and wet season. Spatiotemporal variation in...

Most development planners and practitioners have often wrongly assumed that solutions for community challenges lie within the “western scientific knowledge” only. However, the recent studies have highlighted the relevance of Indigenous Knowledge to inform western scientific solutions. This study is on the Barotse Flood Plain of the Western Province...

Study region This research is carried out in the Kabompo Basin, a headwater catchment of the Zambezi Basin which has an area of 67,261 km². Kabompo River originates in North-Western Province of Zambia between the Zambezi and Congo River Basins. Study focus This study focuses on error propagation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrati...

Study region Central Rift Valley Lakes sub-basin, Ethiopia. Study focus The competition for water is rapidly increasing in Central Rift Valley lakes sub-basin due to the combined effect of various water resources developments. However, the impacts of recent and future water resources development pathways on the water balance of the three interconn...

Study region The Lake Tana sub-basin, upper Blue Nile, Ethiopia Study focus The Lake Tana sub-basin is one of the agricultural growth corridors for Ethiopia’s ambitious plan to expand irrigation. Despite the booming irrigation activities in the sub-basin, limited information exists on the rate of irrigation expansion and its impact on the water ba...

The hydrological impact of many expensive investments on watershed interventions remains unquantified due to lack of time series data. In this study, remote sensing imagery is utilized to quantify and detect vegetation cover change in Magera micro-watershed, Ethiopia, where sustainable land management interventions have been implemented. Normalized...

Declining data quality threatens water resources management in the Lake Tana sub-basin

A correct and timely land use/land cover (LULC) classification provides indispensable information for the effective management of environmental and natural resources. However, earlier studies mapped the LULC map of Bilate Sub-basin using remote sensing images that were acquired for a single season. Hence, these studies did not consider the seasonal...

Study Region The Ethiopian Rift Valley Lakes basin is found in the main Ethiopian Rift Valley system. Study Focus Understanding the hydrological impact of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is of a paramount importance for society since it substantially affects the environmental and socio-economic conditions. The relation between ENSO indicators...

Lake Ziway is providing water for a wide variety of sectors in the central rift valley of Ethiopia. However, there is a lack of systematic study that informs the effect of water abstraction on the lake water balance. In the present study, we conducted a Water Abstraction Survey (WAS) to estimate actual water withdrawal from the lake and developed a...

The frequency and intensity of extreme climate events such as heavy rainfall and droughts are expected to increase with climate change and are predicted to severely affect the agriculture sector. However, drought vulnerability of rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa is not well documented, despite these communities being composed of mainly small...

In this study, the impact of climate change on the streamflow of the Arjo-Didessa catchment, Upper Blue Nile basin, is evaluated. We used the outputs of four climate models for two representative concentration pathway (RCP) climate scenarios, which are RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5. Streamflow simulation was done by using the HEC-HMS rainfall-runoff model, w...

https://doi.org/10.5337/2020.207

Irrigation scheduling and application efficiency were evaluated for Meki-Ziway irrigation scheme in an overall effort to revitalize the scheme. The evaluation was done on three furrows in each of the four farm plots. Field capacity, permanent wilting point and bulk density of the four plots were determined in the laboratory. We monitored furrow inf...

https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/latest/2020/07/labinasuitcase/

Integration of remote sensing data sets from multiple satellites is tested to simulate water storage variation of Lake Ziway, Ethiopia for the period 2009-2018. Sixty Landsat ETM+/OLI images served to trace temporal variation of lake surface area using a water extraction index. Time series of lake levels were acquired from two altimetry databases t...

We describe the technical feasibility of metagenomic water quality analysis using only portable equipment, for example mini-vacuum pumps and filtration units, mini-centrifuges, mini-PCR machines and the memory-stick sized MinION of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, for the library preparation and sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicons. Using this portab...

Applicability of satellite rainfall products must be explored since rain gauge networks have limitations to provide adequate spatial coverage. In this study, Climate Hazards InfraRed Precipitation (CHIRP) satellite-only product was evaluated for rainfall-runoff modelling whereas the simulated runoff served as input to simulate water level from 1986...

The actual accuracy of satellite rainfall products is often unknown due to the limitation of raingauge networks. We evaluated the effect of gauge representativeness error on evaluation of rainfall estimates from the CHIRPS (Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data) rainfall product. The reference data were collected using an e...

Understanding recharge processes is fundamental to improve sustainable groundwater resource management. Shallow groundwater (SGW) is being developed for multiple purposes in Ethiopia without consideration of monitoring. We established a citizen science-based hydro-meteorological monitoring network, with a focus on SGW recharge estimation, in Eshito...

Water resources development and research significantly suffered from lack of stream low data. Regionalization of model parameters was found veryuseful in filling such data gaps. We therefore regionalized the parameters of the HBV model so that the model could be used in ungauged catchments ofthe Upper Blue Nile (UBN) basin. Although we collected st...

Significant change has been observed in the water level of Lake Ziway in Ethiopia which hinders its services for a wide variety of ecosystems. However, the contribution of water withdrawal and its impact on the lake water level variation has not been quantified yet. In this study, we conducted a water abstraction survey (WAS) to estimate actual wat...

Abstract: This study focuses on the headwater catchment of the Zambezi River and investigates the propagation effects of CMORPH rainfall errors on streamflow simulation in the Representative Elementary Watershed (REW) framework. Model simulations for the 2006-2012 period are carried out with uncorrected and bias corrected CMORPH (the Climate Predic...

We present an evidence-based approach to identify how best to support development of groundwater for small-scale irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We argue that it is important to focus this effort on shallow groundwater resources. We demonstrate and test this proposal at a case study site: Dangila woreda in the north-western highlands of Eth...

Satellite rainfall estimates (SREs) are prone to bias as they are indirect derivatives of the visible, infrared, and/or microwave cloud properties, and hence SREs need correction. We evaluate the influence of elevation and distance from large-scale open water bodies on bias for Climate Prediction Center-MORPHing (CMORPH) rainfall estimates in the Z...

This guideline is the second part of a two-part series concerning citizen science hydroclimate monitoring. The two guidelines were designed to be simultaneously consulted though the first is focused particularly on Ethiopia. The documents have been developed following citizen science research in Ethiopia since 2014 and in India since 2016 where mul...

Rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa commonly rely on shallow hand-dug wells and springs; consequently, shallow aquifers are an extremely important water source. Increased utilisation of shallow groundwater could help towards achieving multiple sustainable development goals (SDGs) by positively impacting poverty, hunger, and health. However, the...

This document provides the first guideline to inform community-based monitoring (CBM) implementation in Ethiopia. It has been developed following citizen science research in Ethiopia since March 2014, where multiple study sites have had CBM implemented using an iterative process leading to continual improvement of the methodology. In addition, the...