Celray James Chawanda

• PhD Engineering Sciences; MSc Water Resources Engineering
• Researcher at Texas A&M Agrilife Research

Climate change and variability in Malawi have had a wide impact on rain-fed agricultural production. The recent climatic events suggest new trends in agro-climatic parameters such as dry spell length, total annual rainfall, and planting dates. However, there is dearth of understand the emerging trends on the agro-climatic parameters in Malawi. Both...

Climate change and variability in Malawi have had a wide impact on rain-fed agricultural production. The recent climatic events suggest new trends in agro-climatic parameters such as dry spell length, total annual rainfall, and planting dates. However, there is dearth of understand the emerging trends on the agro-climatic parameters in Malawi. Both...

Quantifying the global extent of anthropogenic impacts on freshwater quality remains challenging due to limited monitoring data, especially in low and middle-income regions. To address this gap and improve our understanding of surface water quality, we introduce CoSWAT-WQ, a large-scale water quality model developed to simulate river water quality...

Global hydrological models are essential tools for understanding water resources and assessing climate change impacts at planetary scales, supporting water management, flood risk assessment, and sustainable development initiatives worldwide. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT+) has demonstrated robust performance across various environments a...

The Ouislane River, located in the R'Dom watershed, is significantly polluted owing to urbanization, industry, and agriculture. Given its importance to the region and its evident degradation, understanding the extent and nature of this pollution is crucial. The reasons for the assessment of water quality in the selected river are strongly related t...

The Nile basin is the second largest basin in Africa and one of the regions experiencing high climatic diversity with variability of precipitation and deteriorating water resources. As climate change is affecting most of the hydroclimatic variables across the world, this study assesses whether historical changes in river flow and sediment loads at...

Africa depends on its water resources for hydroelectricity, inland fisheries and water supply for domestic, industrial and agricultural operations. Anthropogenic climate change (CC) has changed the state of these water resources. Land use and land cover have also undergone significant changes due to the need to provide resources to a growing popula...

Across continental Africa, more than 300 new hydropower projects are under consideration to meet the future energy demand that is expected based on the growing population and increasing energy access. Yet large uncertainties associated with hydroclimatic and socioeconomic changes challenge hydropower planning. In this work, we show that only 40 to...

Africa depends on its water resources for hydroelectricity, inland fisheries, and water supply for domestic, industrial, and agricultural operations. Anthropogenic climate change (CC) has changed the state of these water resources. Land use and land cover has also undergone significant changes due to the need to provide resources to a growing popul...

The Nile basin is the second largest basin in Africa and one of the regions experiencing high climatic diversity with variability and deteriorating water resources. As climate change is affecting most of the hydroclimatic variables across the world, this study assesses whether historical changes in river flow and sediment loads in the Nile basin ma...

Water is one of the fundamental resources of economic prosperity, food security, human habitats, and the driver of many global phenomena, such as droughts, floods, contaminated water, disease, poverty, and hunger. Therefore, its deterioration and its inadequate use lead to heavy impacts on environmental resources and humans. Thus, we argue that to...

In most (sub)-tropical African cultivated regions, more than one cropping season exists following the (one or two) rainy seasons. An additional cropping season is possible when irrigation is applied during the dry season, which could result in three cropping seasons. However, most studies using agro-hydrological models such as the Soil and Water As...

Study region Nile basin. Study focus Several studies have shown a relationship between climate change and changes in sediment yield. However, there are limited modeling applications that study this relationship at regional scales mainly due to data availability and computational cost. This study proposes a methodological framework using the SWAT+...

The modelling of electricity systems with substantial shares of renewable resources, such as solar power, wind power and hydropower, requires datasets on renewable resource profiles with high spatiotemporal resolution to be made available to the energy modelling community. Whereas such resources exist for solar power and wind power profiles on diur...

Soil erosion is an increasingly issue worldwide, due to several factors including climate variations and humans’ activities, especially in Mediterranean ecosystems. Therefore, the aim of this paper is: (i) to quantify and to predict soil erosion rate for the baseline period (2000–2013) and a future period (2014–2027), using the Revised Universal So...

To date, most regional and global hydrological models either ignore the representation of cropland or consider crop cultivation in a simplistic way or in abstract terms without any management practices. Yet, the water balance of cultivated areas is strongly influenced by applied management practices (e.g. planting, irrigation, fertilization, and ha...

The modelling of electricity systems with substantial shares of renewable resources, such as solar power, wind power and hydropower, requires datasets on renewable resource profiles with high spatiotemporal resolution to be made available to the energy modelling community. Whereas such resources exist for solar power and wind power profiles on diur...

To date, most regional and global hydrological models either ignore the representation of cropland or consider crop cultivation in a simplistic way or in abstract terms without any management practices. Yet, the water balance of cultivated areas is strongly influenced by applied management practices (e.g. planting, irrigation, fertilization, harves...

In most (sub)-tropical African cultivated regions, more than one cropping cycle exists following the (one or two) rainy seasons. During the dry season, an additional cropping cycle is possible when irrigation is applied, which could result in 3 cropping seasons. In most agro-hydrological model applications such as SWAT+ in Africa, only one cropping...

The modelling of electricity systems with substantial shares of renewable resources, such as solar power, wind power and hydropower, requires datasets on renewable resource profiles with high spatiotemporal resolution to be made available to the energy modelling community. Whereas such resources exist for solar power and wind power profiles on diur...

Climate change (CC) has a high impact on hydrological processes which calls for reliable projections of CC hydrological impacts at large scales. However, there are several challenges in hydrological modelling at large scales. Large-scale models are often not adapted and evaluated at regional scale due to high computation time requirements or lack o...

[Note: This article is accessible to all via https://rdcu.be/b4pI8] The worldwide growth of variable renewable power sources necessitates power system flexibility to safeguard the reliability of electricity supply. Yet today, flexibility is mostly delivered by fossil fuel power plants. Hydropower can be a renewable alternative source of flexibilit...

A Graphical User Interface (GUI) is regularly used to support model applications in catchment hydrological modelling software. A GUI is generally user-friendly for novice users but opens sources of irreproducible research. We illustrate that none of the 10 Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) models over the Upper Blue Nile can easily be reproduce...

In SWAT and SWAT+ models, the variations in hydrological processes are represented by Hydrological Response Units (HRUs). In the default models, agricultural land cover is represented by a single growing cycle. However, agricultural land use, especially in African cultivated catchments, typically consists of several cropping seasons, following dry...

For almost 30 years, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) has been successfully implemented to address issues around various scientific subjects in the world. On the other hand, it has been reaching to the limit of potential flexibility in further development by the current structure. The new generation SWAT, dubbed SWAT+, was released recentl...

For proper management of oasis environment, it is important to understand the hydrological processes which are driven by surface-groundwater interactions. The quantification of these interactions requires the coupling of groundwater and surface water models. In this study, we aim at comparing groundwater recharge and discharge in the catchment/oasi...

Evapotranspiration (ET) has a large impact on water resources from a global to field scale and accounts for the largest flux in the hydrological cycle. As such, it is central in Water Productivity (WP) studies and the simulation and evaluation of this key variable is important in the reliable assessment of water productivity in a given study area....

Baseflow separation plays a major role in calculation of runoff coefficients and in the component-wise calibration of hydrologic models. The tools which are used in separating baseflow are based on various assumptions which may not be fully met across various catchments. When used in the cases where the hypotheses behind their operation are not ful...