The continent of Africa Water Resources Availability

Water Resources Africa

Accurate knowledge of freshwater availability is indispensable for water resources management at the regional or national level. In this project, we estimated the freshwater availability of the continent of Africa at a subbasin level and monthly intervals using advanced modeling tools.

This project served as a precursor of another one, where we modeled the impact of climate change on the water resources of the Africa continent

Accurate knowledge of freshwater availability is indispensable for water resources management at the regional or national level. However, this information has historically been very difficult to obtain because of lack of data, difficulties in the aggregation of spatial information, and problems in quantifying distributed hydrological processes. The currently available estimates of freshwater availability by a few large international organizations such as FAO and UNESCO are often not sufficient. They only provide aggregated rough quantities of river discharge and groundwater recharge at a national level and on a yearly basis. In this project, we provide a procedure to improve the estimations of freshwater availability at subbasin level and monthly intervals. We used a semi-distributed hydrological model to assess freshwater components such as blue water flow (i.e., water yield plus deep aquifer recharge), green water flow (i.e., actual evapotranspiration), and green water storage (i.e., soil water) at a subbasin level with a monthly resolution for the African continent and at a smaller scale for Western Africa. We also quantified the uncertainty in our calculations. Quantification of uncertainty is vital for designing a more realistic management strategy. As more accurate data are becoming available from satellites, more accurate estimates can reduce uncertainties. In this project, based on the 2005 population, we calculated the freshwater availability and identified the water-stressed countries.