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Climate Change Impact on Agricultural Water Resources Variability in the Northern Highlands of Ethiopia

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Nile River Basin

Abstract

The economy of Ethiopia mainly depends on agriculture, and this in turn largely depends on available water resources. A major effect of climate change is likely to be alterations in hydrologic cycles and changes in water availability. This chapter reports the use of global climate models (GCM’s) and application of a hydrological model to investigate agricultural water resources’ sensitivity to climate change in the Lake Tana Basin, Ethiopia. Projected changes in precipitation and temperature in the basin for two future seasons (2046–2065 and 2080–2100) were analyzed using outputs from fifteen GCMs. A historical-modification procedure was used to downscale large scale outputs from four GCM models to watershed-scale climate data. The study then investigated how these changes in temperature and precipitation might translate into changes in streamflow and other hydrological components using SWAT model. We interpret the different aspects of the hydrological responses to imply that changes in runoff and other hydrological variables could be significant, even though the GCMs do not agree on the direction of the change indicating high uncertainty.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Environment, Florida International University, Miami, FL, 33199, USA

    Shimelis G. Setegn

  2. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Gothenburg, 405 30, Gothenburg, Sweden

    David Rayner

  3. Department of Earth and Environment, Florida International University, Modesto A. Maidique Campus, Miami, FL, 33199, USA

    Assefa M. Melesse

  4. Department of Land and Water Resources Engineering, The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden

    Bijan Dargahi

  5. Spatial Science Laboratory, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Ragahavan Srinivasan

  6. Land and Water Resources Engineering, Stockholm, Sweden

    Anders Wörman

Authors
  1. Shimelis G. Setegn
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  2. David Rayner
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  3. Assefa M. Melesse
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  4. Bijan Dargahi
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  5. Ragahavan Srinivasan
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  6. Anders Wörman
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shimelis G. Setegn .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Environment, Florida International University, Modesto A. Maidique Campus, 33199, Miami, Florida, USA

    Assefa M. Melesse

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Setegn, S.G., Rayner, D., Melesse, A.M., Dargahi, B., Srinivasan, R., Wörman, A. (2011). Climate Change Impact on Agricultural Water Resources Variability in the Northern Highlands of Ethiopia. In: Melesse, A.M. (eds) Nile River Basin. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0689-7_12

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