Trend analysis of precipitation data: A case study of Blue Nile Basin, Africa

Abstract

Implementation of water management policies requires decision support system tools in order to evaluate available water resources and create awareness of possible threats such as floods and droughts. Modelling is one of these decision support tools. However, in developing countries, they do not lack only appropriate tools and personnel to develop and maintain water resources model, but they do not have sufficient data to build, calibrate and validate models. For instance, the rain gauge network is too sparse to produce reliable areal rainfall estimation. Blue Nile Basin is one of the basins that suffer from this problem. Consequently, it can effect on the drainages countries like Sudan and Egypt if it is not managed. In order to develop management, different sources other than ground collected data should be used. Radar technology for topography is not feasible based on the high cost. Another alternative is remote sensed data and its derivatives. This chapter gives an assessment for the availability and quality of remote sensed and global rainfall data as one of the important forcing data which should be used to set up a hydrological model.