Challenges and opportunities in modelling water balance partitioning in East African drylands

摘要: Understanding and quantifying the water balance partitioning between surface, soil and groundwater in East African drylands is of great importance for robust water management under climate change. Modelling in such dryland regions presents both an opportunity to explore the water balance and its sensitivity to environmental change, but also serious challenges where the necessary data are often sparse for model parametrisation, forcing and evaluation. To tackle these challenges we have developed a hydrological model of DRYland Partitioning of the water balance (DRYP) which represents dryland-specific, surface-subsurface hydrological processes in an integrated way. It is structurally flexible and parsimonious enough to allow large Monte Carlo ensembles to be run for model parameter and structural uncertainty estimation. We have applied DRYP to the c. 15 000 km2 Upper Ewaso Ngiro basin in Kenya …