Regional Development Profile of Ewaso Ng

Abstract

Water resources are becoming increasingly scarce in the Mt. Kenya region. Land use and climate change may pose additional challenges to water management in the future. In order to assess the impacts of environmental change, the NRM3 Streamflow Model, a simple, semi-distributed, grid-based water balance model, is evaluated as a tool for discharge prediction in six meso-scale catchments on the western slopes of Mt. Kenya, and used to analyse the impact of land use and climate change scenarios on water resources.

The calibration and validation results show an acceptable performance of the NRM3 Streamflow Model in simulating discharge. Input data represent the main limitation. Rainfall patterns in the mountainous catchments are very heterogeneous and difficult to capture with the monitoring network. River water abstractions make up 80–100% of naturalized dry season discharge, but amounts can only be approximately estimated