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

作者:Belete, Marye; Deng, Jinsong*; Zhou, Mengmeng; Wang, Ke; You, Shixue; Hong, Yang; Weston, Melanie
来源:Sustainability, 2018, 10(3): 810.
DOI:10.3390/su10030810

摘要

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.