HR: 0800h
AN: H21G-0818    [Abstracts]
TI: Exploring Patterns of Hydrological Drought from Proxy Data in Wabi Shebele river basin, East Africa
AU: * Awass, A A
EM: adane.abebe@uni-siegen.de
AF: Research Institute for Water and Environment, Civil Engineering Department, University of Siegen, Germany, Siegen, 57076, Germany
AU: Foerch, G
EM: gerd.foerch@uni-siegen.de
AF: Research Institute for Water and Environment, Civil Engineering Department, University of Siegen, Germany, Siegen, 57076, Germany
AU: Klaassen, U S
EM: Ute.SassKlaassen@wur.nl
AF: Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group (FEM) Centre for Ecosystem Studies, Wageningen University and Research Centre, Wageningen, 47 NL-6700, Netherlands
AB: Quite often, in developing countries,many watersheds are totally ungauged or havestreamflow records for a short period of time. This problem may be compounded with inconsistency in hydrometric measurement and storage thatimpairs the quality of data retrieved.In time series analysis short lengthdata is not much different than none, thus precluding a clear understanding of the temporal hydrological phenomenon. Hence most conclusions drawn from such a data suffer a similar unreliability. Signature of water stress can be identified in tree rings. This investigation attempts to explore the potential of this proxy data for hydrological drought reconstruction in Wabi Shebele basin, a transboudary river basin in East Africa. Using Incremental corer and disk sampler, 31 cored and 17 disk samples of tree rings were collected at various sites and from different species in the riparian environment. The residual tree ring series has a good correlation with historical streamflow in the dry season. A long term seasonal hydrological drought series is reconstructed from the proxy record and temporally disaggregated. Possible improvement of the reconstructed series due to supplementary attributes from climatic and remotely sensed vegetation characteristics of the catchment is also analysed. The reconstructed series mimics well the hydrological drought series established from gauged historical flows. Patterns of drought in the study area are investigated by cross wavelet analysis.
DE: 1812 Drought
DE: 1816 Estimation and forecasting
DE: 1833 Hydroclimatology
DE: 1860 Streamflow
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting