Land use and climate change effects on water yield from East African forested water towers

Wamucii, Charles Nduhiu; van Oel, Pieter R.; Ligtenberg, Arend; Gathenya, John Mwangi; Teuling, Adriaan J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-5641-2021

Articles | Volume 25, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-5641-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-5641-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 25, issue 11

Research article

|

03 Nov 2021

Research article |

| 03 Nov 2021

Land use and climate change effects on water yield from East African forested water towers

Charles Nduhiu Wamucii, Pieter R. van Oel, Arend Ligtenberg, John Mwangi Gathenya, and Adriaan J. Teuling

Data sets

CHIRPS: Rainfall Estimates from Rain Gauge and Satellite Observations University of California https://www.chc.ucsb.edu/data/chirps

High-resolution gridded datasets (and derived products) Climatic Research Unit (University of East Anglia) and NCAS https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/

The Climate Data Guide: NDVI: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index-3rd generation: NASA/GFSC GIMMS National Center for Atmospheric Research Staff https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/ndvi-normalized-difference-vegetation-index-3rd-generation-nasagfsc-gimms

Short summary

East African water towers (WTs) are under pressure from human influences within and without, but the water yield (WY) is more sensitive to climate changes from within. Land use changes have greater impacts on WY in the surrounding lowlands. The WTs have seen a strong shift towards wetter conditions while, at the same time, the potential evapotranspiration is gradually increasing. The WTs were identified as non-resilient, and future WY may experience more extreme variations.