The Samarinda Water Project

The cities of Tenggarong and Samarinda in East Kalimantan are in need of a new source of drinking water, since their current source, the Mahakam river, is said to be polluted. The client of this project, Arsari Enviro Industri, owns a large concession named ITCI of a partly degraded forest 90 kilometers East of Samarinda. This report suggests...

Formulation of transport in a catchment-scale conceptual model

Standard conceptual hydrological models can rarely accommodate stream tracer dynamics at the catchmentscale. They rely on the generation of runoff through the propagation of a pressure wave and do not accountfor the actual advective movement of particles. Over the last years different model frameworks have beendeveloped to account for this...

Finding the Optimum Unsaturated Zone Storage Change Estimation Method to Improve Water Accounting in Vietnam

Evaluation of Two Automated Remote Sensing-Based Surface Energy Balance Models for Estimating Daily Evapotranspiration

Using remote sensed actual evaporation to improve hydrological models

In hydrological models evaporation is often still quite uncertain. Potential evaporation is used as input, but the modelling of plant stresses is not always accurate enough to describe the behaviour in reality. In situ measured actual evaporation data is rare, and doing measurements is time consuming and expensive. With the advance of satellite...

Blind estuaries during drought: The influences of a sandbar on mangrove trees

Small blind estuaries are a common phenomenon on the coast of Nicaragua, but unfortunately not much is known on their hydrological characteristics. A blind estuary can be identified by a sandbar that temporarily closes the estuary from sea. These blind estuaries often have very diverse flora and fauna on which they play an important ecological...

Sediment transport modelling: Determination of the main areas contributing to the suspended sediment load in the Mara River, Kenya

The Mara River originates in Kenya in the Mau Escarpment and flows through the Serengeti ecosystem into Lake Victoria in Tanzania; in total it is about 395 km long. In this river, human interventions have led to increased of agricultural areas. As a result, increased fast runoff and top soil erosion is expected. Consequently, more sediments is...

Thinking inside the box: Using reservoir levels to improve a conceptual rainfall-runoff model in the Umbeluzi River Basin

The development of a conceptual rainfall-runoff model generally requires calibration to obtain non-observable parameters. This becomes especially difficult in river basins where data are absent, frequently intermittent or inaccurate. Rainfall-runoff models are usually calibrated on discharge data that are derived from stage observations by means...

Groundwater modelling of the khettara area of Fezna-Jorf-Hannabou, Morocco

This master thesis comprehends a study on khettaras, historical subsurface drainage tunnels, in East Morocco. A numerical groundwater model was set up to simulate these systems and to get a better understanding of their behaviour. Subsequently, the model was used to simulate the effect of several scenarios: increased use of pumped wells in the...

Calibrating a rainfall-runoff model in a data scarce catchment in Mozambique

Rainfall runoff modeling is a major task of many hydrologist. Therefore always a lot of research is done to modeling. One of the problems of modeling is often the lack of data. Most of the world is data scarce, in the sense that no discharge is being measured. Although this is the case, it is often preferable to make a model of a catchment in...

Modelling ungauged lowland basins: Does complementary groundwater data add value to topography driven conceptual modelling?

A common practice for hydrologists to determine the performance of a hydrological model and its parameter values, is by calibrating the model parameters on observed discharge data, but this data is not always available. For this reason, other data should be used as complementary data in order to reduce the uncertainty of outflow and processes in...

Partitioning of evaporation fluxes in summer and winter using stable isotope approach

Irrigation is the largest user of fresh water in the world. Unfortunately a large part of irrigation is unsustainable and inefficiently causing water scarcity with sometimes terrible effects on the water cycle, ecology, economy and food production. The key in determining the efficiency of irrigation is to investigate how much irrigation water is...

Observing the hydrology of China from space - detection of anthropogenic changes in hydrology using spaceborne measurements

In this study we focus on the use of remotely sensed data, mainly data from the GRACE mission, for the detection of hydrological changes in China. More specifically, the Hai - Huai - Huang basins and the impoundment of the Three Gorges reservoir are studied. Due to noise and the required filtering of the monthly GRACE gravity field solutions...

Agriculture in Kenya: Design of a small-scale irrigation system to stimulate agricultural activities in Kilole.

This thesis presents the results of a research done on the agricultural situation of Kilole. Kilole is a small Kenyan village located between Mombasa and the Tanzanian border. Looking at the annual rainfall, it can not be said that there is a lack of it in Kilole. However, because of its poor distribution the year is diverted in two rain seasons...