Abstract:
Upper Blue Nile Basin (UBNB) is the water tower of not only for Ethiopia but also for
downstream countries. This region is quite useful for agricultural purposes, owing to essential
climate elements such as sufficient precipitation, optimal temperature, surface water (e.g. Lake
Tana and Abay basin), and underground water. However, there is no exact mechanism to
estimate spatiotemporal precipitation distribution over this region, because UBNB exhibits
variable topographic features. Hence to solve this challenge we inferred different precipitation
estimation techniques (e.g. weather radar, gauge, satellite, and reanalysis). In Ethiopia, a large
study has been conducted on precipitation using rain gauge network data. Gauge precipitation
data unable to provide required temporal and spatial distribution over UBNB in Ethiopia because
of insufficient network and density of rain gauges. Weather radar provides precipitation with
high accuracy and precision through measuring the signal of reflectivity power with large spatial
coverage. Moisture budget analysis and recycling ratio was analyzed, because it is an attractive
method to determine the relative contribution of the study area moisture for the effect of
spatiotemporal precipitation distribution. The precipitation variability was partly derived by the
influence of middle and lower atmosphere parameters. This work is focused on the estimation of
spatiotemporal variability of precipitation and moisture budget using reanalysis and the ground
data over the UBNB in Ethiopia. To this end, we incorporated precipitation, reflectivity,
temperature, cloud cover, gravity wave dispersion, outgoing-long wave radiation, incident solar
radiation, ozone concentration, carbon dioxide, methane, specific humidity and wind data
inferred from 1979-2017.
Recently, ground-based (g-b) weather radar was installed at Shawera within UBNB in the
northwest of Ethiopia in 2016. Hence, we are interested to develop reflectivity (Z) and rain rate
(R) relationship model for the purpose of precipitation estimation after improving the errors.
Projectile rainfall motion error correction, the least squared regression, likelihood function,
different error metrics, moisture budget equations and Recycling ratio were mostly applied on
this study. The derived Z-R relation model parameter values were found to be a multiplicative
factor a = 55 and the exponent factor b = 1.12. After applied projectile rainfall motion error
correction, a proportional error has been reduced from 0.3 mm to 0.08 mm by 22%. Similarly,
random error from -0.08 mm to 0.07 mm by 1% and the total error reduced by 12%. The
correlation coefficients between the gauge and the European Centre for Medium-range Weather
Forecast (ECMWF) were found 0.82. When we analyzed spatiotemporal distribution of
precipitation over the study domain, during summer season most of the UBNB moisture was
converted to precipitation around the central parts of the study area, while in spring it contributes
to the southern parts of the study area. Furthermore, the northeast part of the study area was
affected by the basins` moisture during the autumn season. The calculated recycling ratios for
summer, autumn, spring, and winter were 9.70%, 16.33%, 19.01%, and 35.30%, respectively
with the annual average value of 20.11%.
The salient feature of this thesis is the consideration of the projectile method for improving the
radar data over the UBNB in Ethiopia and this method can be suggested to another radar sites in
the world. Atmospheric moisture budget analysis reveals that UBNB moisture had a lesser
contribution of precipitation over the study area, rather than the neighboring countries. Annual
precipitation is directly negatively influenced by temperature, strong gravity waves, and incident
solar radiation. Hence, the outcomes from this study will serves as a reference for future
configuration and calibration of the radar system in Ethiopia. In order to draw a better
conclusion, further studies on moisture budget are required in the context of Ethiopia.
Furthermore, consideration of water vapor nuclei on precipitation variability study is very
important in addition to the influence of middle atmosphere parameters. Investigation of high
gravity wave occurrence frequency is quite useful to predict the severe drought in Ethiopia.
_______________________________________________