Estimating and communicating climate impacts on groundwater and surface water resources in northern Mozambique

Minihane, Michele R, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

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.