Abstract
Hydrological impacts of human activities and climate variability on Ketar and Meki watersheds of Lake Ziway basin, Ethiopia were studied using the soil and water assessment tool. Three land-use change and two climate variability scenarios were considered to analyze the separate and combined impacts on annual water balance, monthly streamflow, and spatial distributions of evapotranspiration and water yield. The evaluation showed that changes in land use resulted in an increase in annual surface runoff and water yield for Ketar watershed and an increase in annual ET for Meki. Similarly, the climate variability resulted in a decrease in annual ET, surface runoff, and water yield for Ketar watershed and a decrease in ET for Meki. Overall, climate variability has greater impacts on the monthly streamflow compared to land-use change impacts. Similarly, greater sensitivity in hydrologic response was observed for Ketar watershed compared to Meki watershed.
Highlights
Climate variability and change in land use are among the most influential factors affecting the hydrologic responses of a watershed
The LULC types confusion matrixes using ground validation points and google earth images show that the overall accuracy of the analysis of the LULC changes was above 80.5% and the overall kappa statistics were greater than 0.71 (Tables 2 and 3)
The results showed that the monthly streamflow simulated for the different land-use scenarios (S0, Scenario 1 (S1), and Scenario 2 (S2)) have shown minor changes in both watersheds, the monthly streamflow simulated for different climate scenarios have shown considerable changes
Summary
Climate variability and change in land use are among the most influential factors affecting the hydrologic responses of a watershed. Climate variability affects the temporal and spatial distribution of precipitation and temperature. Land-use change affects the hydrology of a watershed in terms of base flow, surface runoff, and sediment and nutrient yields. Frequency, depth, and duration of a flood can be affected following the changes in the amount of interception, infiltration, and evapotranspiration from precipitation and temperature variability [4,5,6,7]. The hydrological systems of different basins, closed lake basins, in Africa have been affected by multiple forces including climate variabilities in addition to factors like socio-economic activities, population growth, and national development policies, which resulted in an intensive land-use change [8,9]. According to Coe and Foley [11], Lake
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