Dr. Michele R Minihane has been granted the NSF Earth Sciences postdoctoral fellowship to carry out a research and education plan at the University of Washington, Seattle. The project will quantify the impacts of changing climate on the future availability of groundwater and surface water in a region with limited historic hydrological measurements and communicate the potential changes in a meaningful way to the local community and planners. The research will combine remote sensing data, field measurements, and personal interviews to build and calibrate a regional-scale hydrologic model for northern Mozambique. Downscaled data from global climate circulation models will provide inputs for future hydrologic conditions allowing the model to estimate the impacts of climate scenarios on water resource availability in the region. The research will be conducted in collaboration with individuals living and working in Mozambique to both increase community support and to facilitate more effective in-country dissemination of results. Today, access to clean water is a pressing challenge in many parts of the world, including areas in southeastern Africa, will likely become more water-stressed in the future. To further complicate the challenges, these regions typically lack the reliable long-term hydrologic datasets used for water resources planning. This project will address both needs by developing methods to evaluate current groundwater and surface water resource availability from limited available data and by creating models to quantify the local future water availability with climate change. The project will potentially directly impact water resources planning in northern Mozambique, making it easier for local policy makers to understand and predict water availability in the region and thereby providing health and economic benefits to the region. A critical piece of this work will be development of strategies to effectively communicate these results to the local communities and water resources planners. Results will also be shared with non-governmental organizations and donor agencies interested in improving health and economic conditions in rural Africa. The study will focus on provinces in northern Mozambique, but the modeling methodologies and communications strategies developed will be broadly applicable to other regions in Africa and around the world. The results will also be shared through a publicly available website and through collaborations and conferences in Africa and the United States.
In parts of the world, particularly in developing countries, human health and economic development are dependent on effective management of water resources. Effective water resources management is dependent on how well the local and regional water resources are understood, both historically and under future uncertainties. Unfortunately, in some places in which water resource development is most critical, there are few direct observations of streamflow, precipitation, and other important parameters. This research tackles the challenge of water resources planning in regions with few observations and describes simple and practical methods for estimating current and future water resource availability. In this research, I leveraged remote sensing data, global gridded hydrologic parameter datasets (such as precipitation and vegetation data), and sparse local observations of streamflow and precipitation to estimate streamflow in river basins in northern Mozambique using multiple approaches. Common methods of estimating streamflow in ungauged river basins require a high density of data in nearby basins. In this region, however, there are insufficient data to apply these other approaches. In spite of the sparse ground-based observations (for example, stream level gauges in rivers), I was able to leverage the observations available in combination with remote sensing data to make separate independent estimates (using different data and different methods) of mean monthly streamflow in multiple river basins in the region. This work resulted in estimates of mean monthly flows in several river basins in northern Mozambique for the time period of 1999-2008. Then, I combined the historic data with climate projection data from 15 global circulation models to estimate how the streamflow conditions might change in the next 20-40 years given climate change projections. The climate projection models agree that temperatures throughout the year are likely to increase 1-1.5°C during this period. Increased temperatures will decrease annual streamflow by increasing evaporative demand. The start of the wet season might be slightly delayed due to decreased precipitation at the transition between the end of the dry season and the beginning of the wet season. The climate models do not necessarily agree on other aspects of future precipitation changes, such as the total monthly quantity of precipitation or the distribution of precipitation events in many small storms versus fewer larger events. However, the results that are consistent across all of the models have significant implications for potential reservoir management and agricultural planning. I shared my results and discussed this project with researchers and students in the US and Mozambique (3 conferences in the US, 1 in Canada, and 1 in Mozambique; several seminars at the University of Washington and 1 seminar at the Colorado School of Mines) and with regional water resources planners in Mozambique. The regional water resources planners in northern Mozambique were interested in the results I provided, and we had useful dialogs during my visits to their offices. The results of this research project provide a starting point for these water resources planners to consider future investments, such as infrastructure for hydropower plants, drinking water, irrigated agriculture, or additional hydrological gauging stations. In addition, the methodology is likely to be useful in other regions with few ground-based observations. In addition, during the fellowship period, I initiated, organized, and co-convened a session at a major conference in the US (the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting) 3 years in a row, published or submitted 3 manuscripts, served as a volunteer for SACNAS (Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science), co-led a hydrology-focused introductory GIS workshop for students in Mozambique, served as a reviewer for a research journal and the NSF, and mentored an undergraduate honors research project.
