| dc.description.abstract | ABSTRACT
The effect of climate change not only touches every corner of our planet s ecosystem, however, the water cycle is no exception due to the processes involved which are highly dependent on temperature changes. Therefore, impacts of climate change on flood levels is one issue of important issues to be addressed now due to the lifetime of new infrastructure and the need to determine design floods that are relevant for the future climatic conditions.
Lake Victoria being at one of the centres of diverse attractions draws a lot of studies on climate change. This study therefore was undertaken to investigate the of changes in future floods from the basin inflows to the lake on current infrastructure and the need to adapt to changes in the future. Projecting the future inflows from the catchment was assessed using tow model runs obtained from two Global Circulation Models (GCMs). Two scenarios defined by Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP), RCP45 and RCP85 were used for the climate change studies. Daily precipitation, temperature and aggregated inflows from the catchment over the period of 1980-2005 was used for to compare with future projections for 2041-2065 and 2073-2097. Projections by the GCMs was used on the Delta Change approach.
A gridded resolution of 0.25o x 0.25o (50x50km) was used by ENKI framework an HBV distributed model to simulate the inflows and estimate the evaporation both from the land and from the lake. and estimated the evaporation from and precipitation on Lake Victoria. The total annual precipitation is expected to increase by 3% and 6% for the period 2041-2065 and 2073-2097 scenarios respectively.
The future design flood from the future GCM simulations is not expected to exceed the historical design flood. | |
