Abstract
Water is one of the vital requirements for life, economic and social development. Water scarcity affects the environmental, economic and developmental activities of an area. The rainfall in the sub-basins is often very local, erratic, unreliable and unevenly distributed over the whole area of Dawa sub-basin. The pastoral and agro-pastoral communities are usually vulnerable to drought. The present study was an attempt to describe the state of Rain Water Harvesting (RWH) techniques and the contribution of Remote Sensing and GIS technologies for this RWH in the Dawa Sub basin. The study was conducted using physiographic factors of Dawa sub basin. Landsat image with spatial resolution 30m were used to identify LU/LC types. The thematic layers used were land use/land cover, slope, soil, drainage and runoff from derived from Landsat and collateral data. The image processing software Erdas IMAGINE and GIS software were used to process the image and to establish a geo information system by comprising digital data set of satellite image, topography, soil, metrology, drainage density and metrology. This data was used to study RWH was used to study the watershed network in the Dawa sub basin and to identify areas generally suitable for water harvesting in order to determine water harvesting techniques for those sites. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to calculate weighting and the analysis result indicates that the sub-basin supports promising opportunity for the establishment and development of RWH structures. From the total area of 17,402.7 km<sup>2</sup>, The GIS evaluation predicts that 3,092.342 km<sup>2</sup> (22.853%) is extremely suitable, 4,524.221 km<sup>2</sup> (33.435%) is very suitable, 2,968.685 km<sup>2</sup> (21.939%) is suitable, 1,988.986 km<sup>2</sup> (14.7%) is less Suitable and 957.18 km<sup>2</sup> (7.07%) is not suitable for RWH.
Highlights
Water is of crucial significance and all through history it has been considered as natural resource basic to human being survival, plants and animal and for environment functions [1, 2]
We aim to identify suitable of Rainwater harvesting (RWH) in Dawa sub-basin of Borana Zone using RS and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques
Within dawa sub basin Remote Sensing and GIS technologies are being applied to asses and select more suitable areas for large –scale water harvesting application in study area
Summary
Water is of crucial significance and all through history it has been considered as natural resource basic to human being survival, plants and animal and for environment functions [1, 2]. Increasing population and higher levels of human activities, including effluent disposals into surface and ground water resources, have made appropriate management of water resources a complex errand throughout the world. Assessing, managing and planning of water resources for sustainable use gets to be an important issue in human life, in the region where rainfall is very low, inconsistent and with very high ground water depth. Their broad utilization is crucial, especially for countries like Ethiopia where the population pressure is increasing ceaselessly [3]. Rainwater harvesting (RWH) is another critical component of watershed planning and resource development. Rainwater harvesting primarily consists of the collection, storage and subsequent utilize of captured rainwater as either the foremost or as a supplementary source of water.
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