Richard Muita

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Kenya Meteorological Department

Provision of weather and climate services are expected to improve the capacity for rural households’ preparedness and response plans to weather shocks. With increase in public investments in developing and communicating weather information on local scale in Nigeria, uncertainty in timescales that meet farmers’ needs and economic value of the inform...

Exceptionally high lake levels in East Africa have caused extensive disruption of the social and economic activities of the affected areas. Various studies suggest that global climate systems provide little evidence that link the lake rises and ENSO and IOD events in East Africa. Other studies have attributed the extreme lake levels to local hydrol...

The impacts of increased water levels in Kenyan lakes are a major problem that is affecting communities and their livelihoods. Upsurge in water levels of the Rift Valley Lakes is one of the recent climate extremes witnessed over Eastern Africa where the rises appear to be consistent with the occurrence of enhanced seasonal rains between 2016 and...

The impacts of increased water levels in Kenyan lakes are a major problem that is affecting communities and their livelihoods. Upsurge in water levels of the Rift Valley Lakes is one of the recent climate extremes witnessed over Eastern Africa where the rises appear to be consistent with the occurrence of enhanced seasonal rains between 2016 and 20...

Forecasts on sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) timescales have huge potential to aid preparedness and disaster risk reduction planning decisions in a variety of sectors. However, realising this potential depends on the provision of reliable information that can be appropriately applied in the decision-making context of users. This study describes the...

One major challenge facing farmers and other end users of weather and climate information (WCI) in Kenya is the linkage between their perceptions, needs, and engagements with producers of the information. This is highlighted by increased interest in understanding the constraints on appropriate use of weather information by farmers in decision-makin...

High‐resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) simulations of heavy rainfall events are known to be strongly sensitive to the choice of the sub‐grid scale parameterisation schemes. In the African continent, studies on such a choice at the convective‐resolving scales are not numerous. By exploiting a state‐of‐the‐art NWP model, the Weather Resea...

One major challenge facing farmers and other end users of weather and climate information (WCI) in Kenya is the linkage between their perceptions, needs, and engagements with producers of the information. This is highlighted by increased interest in understanding the constraints on appropriate use of weather information by farmers in decision-makin...

Kenya’s seven agroclimatic zones were first published in 1983 and upscaled to 12 homogenous climatic zones in 2000. As climate change became more evident over time, a need was identified to once again review and update the distribution of existing climatic zones at a finer scale for use in Sub-counties,the lowest administrative units of the country...

In this study the skill of daily rainfall forecasts over various parts of Kenya during the October- December 2015 and October – December 2014 rainfall seasons is assessed. Daily forecasts and rainfall observations from 6 climatic zones were analysed using the combined probability distribution of occurrence and non-occurrence of rainfall. The skill...

Rift Valley fever (RVF) is a mosquito-borne viral zoonotic disease that occurs throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, with heavy impact in affected countries. Outbreaks are episodic and related to climate variability, especially rainfall and flooding. Despite great strides towards better prediction of RVF epidemics, there i...

Forecasts can be an important component of water cycle management and farm decision making, particularly where rainfall is uncertain. In Kenya, the use of informal or indigenous forecasting ( IF ) is known to be widespread, but farmers also use more formal seasonal forecasting ( SF ) to make decisions in relation to the water cycle. A review of lit...

Farmer perceptions clearly influence the adoption of technology and adaptation to climate change, but may not be consistent with or captured by scientific measurements. There has been a significant research on how perceptions influence water resource management and adaptation to climate, but conclusions are unclear or contradictory. This research a...

ABSTRACT ONLY: Important agricultural areas in Kenya and the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) in Australia are largely semi-arid to arid. Persistent dry periods and timing of dry spells directly impact the availability of soil moisture and hence crop production in these regions. Most studies focus on the analysis of dry spell lengths at an annual scale....