Vulnerability Assessment of Northern Ghana to Climate Variability

When looking at Niger’s spatial distribution, many of the causes of the nation's water issues can be examined and made obvious. Niger has a geographical disadvantage, being landlocked by the countries Chad, Berkina Faso, Benin, Mali, Libya and Algeria. Eighty per cent of Niger is occupied by the Sahara desert, the largest hot desert in the world, renowned for its hot climate and lack of precipitation. According to statistics, Niger receives an average of 7 inches (17.78 cm) of rainfall a year, most of which comes in the months of July and August. Niger is in close proximity the equator, which leads to extremely sultry temperatures, averaging 29 degrees during the dry season and 40 degrees during the humid season. Compared to the climate of the neighbouring nations of Morocco and Algeria, the climate of Niger is extreme. However, Niger has a huge supply of water far underground, about three billion cubic metres of drinking. These factors of Niger’s spatial distribution, from terrain to climate, contribute to the water scarcity.

Heavy precipitation events that historically occurred once in 20 years are projected to occur as frequently as every 5 to 15 years by this late century. Short term droughts are expected to intensify in most regions. Longer term droughts are expected to intensify in larger regions in the Southwest. Flooding may intensify in many U.S regions. Climate change is affecting the groundwater availability also. Sea level rising and storms surges are expected to compromise the sustainability of coastal freshwater and

Climate change data was collected from the IPPC AR4 General Circulation Model (GCM). The GCM is regionally dependent and shows the different mixes of greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere. (Sheffield & Wood, 2007, p.81) The simple mutlicalar drought index (SPEI) is used to show the climatic water balance. Monthly or weekly difference physiologically equivalent temperature (PET) and precipitation and is calculated at different times. (Vicente-Serrano, Beguería, & López-Moreno, 2009, p. 1699) Streamflow data was obtained from the U.S. Geological Survey Hydrological Climate Date Network (HCDN). (Regonda, Rajagopalan, Clark, & Pitlick, 2004, p.374) Snowfall data is gathered from surveys that were performed by the Natural Resources Conservation Service and precipitation data was gathered from the National Weather Service Cooperative Network. (Regonda, Rajagopalan, Clark, & Pitlick, 2004, p.375)

(Hasan and Özay 2002, 73-74). As Albiac (2008) reports, development of pipe network distribution and drip irrigation methods in other countries led the farmers to have remarkable irrigation efficiency in drought (143). Such technologies have already been used in China, but they are not widely spread in China’s agriculture. One investigation in China on rice paddy irrigation systems development was performed and it revealed that using the fry-foot paddy irrigation (when no water flooded the field) instead of flooding irrigation (when the rice field is completely flooded) significantly (40-60%) reduces water consumption (Xiaoping, Qiangsheng and Bin 2004, 351). Furthermore, drip irrigation method was applied in arid Northern China and it raised the water usage efficiency (Du et al 2007). However, introduction of new irrigation technologies faced some difficulties in China. As Hodstedt (2010) noticed in his article, the water saved by these technologies such as drip irrigation systems was simply spent on more food production and, therefore, did not reduce the water shortage. Also, as he reported, this caused two other environmental problems. Firstly, the water, which was the supply for underground water and aquifers as it was lost by deep percolation and leakage, became unavailable after the water-saving technologies were introduced and this strengthened the aquifers depleting along with its overpumping. Secondly, after

Long ago during the long period the tempters were lower then the temperature are now.

To examine whether or not there is a link between drought and water quality types of drought had to be examined in order to choose which drought index to use. A drought is deficiency in precipitation over some period of time. Water shortages can include impacts on vegetation, animals, and/or people. For this project, The Palmer Hydrological Index was chosen because it provides numerical classifications of drought. The PHDI includes standardized calculations for each location based on temperature and precipitation variability of the specific location. This type of calculation makes the data collection and analysis easier, as impairment can be compared to a numerical value and drought is calculated specifically based on the regions temperature and precipitation variability.

In the face of climate change Sub-Saharan Africa is confronted by two main challenges of food security and water availability for human and agricultural use. These challenges are projected to increase in the coming years compounded by extreme droughts and extreme flooding in some areas. Rain-fed agriculture is the main livelihood for a majority of small scale farmers in SSA. Their main farming systems focus on the “ major crops”(maize, wheat, rice and beans) However, strategies to cultivate these crops in the region are no longer sustainable due to reliability on finite resources, high input load and vulnerability to climate change. A key alternative strategy to adapt to a changing climate is the development and promotion of Orphan crop species

Therefore, any changes of the amount of nounrouted delivery to Chowchilla farm, it doesn’t impact the precipitation. However, in both cases, there is significant difference between the precipitation and the total final surface water. This significant difference is caused by impacts of evaporation, infiltration, overland flow, stream flow, and ground water flow in Chowchilla farm. Based on the results, the amount of precipitation in 1969 is about 300,000 ac-ft, and the amount of the final surface water is about 5,000 ac-ft, therefore the loss in this subbasin is about 295,000

According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (1994), all arid areas distributed into three different subgoups, such as arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas. In these zones the average annual precipitation and evapotranspiration. Additionaly, arid areas occupy 41% of the land on Earth and are home for more than 2 billion people. Moreover, zones of the same type exist on all continents in the world except Antarctica. Forty percent of population of Africa, South America and Asia live in arid areas; consequently arid zones dependent on the climatic conditions that are not conducive to the agriculture. A small amount and high variability of precipitation patterns pose serious problems to

Results from the project were ambiguous. We were able to show a statistical correlation between drought and water impairments. However, these results were not always consistent due to the variation in the data. Impairment data is recorded every two years; however, the exact time during that year and weather conditions at that moment the samples are taken are not recorded. Other issues with this data were the lack of consistency in where the test stations are located from year to year. Weather data on the other hand is taken on a daily basis from consistent locations and drought data is compiled every month. Trying to merge or over lay these two types of data proved to be difficult. Due to these issues it is import to point out that correlation does not imply causation. Many other variables could affect water impairment at the time of a drought or

Figure 17. Negative correlation between GISS temperature data and the Tlingit Point composite ring width with year on year differences from 1881-1950 for September-November.

(2014) based on AVHRR imageries. Summary statistics for snow cover extent and timing characteristics, including SCD, SCD_ES and SCD_LS (same as SCD, SCOD and SCMD in this study) were calculated at each 100 m elevation zone within the CARs, and within different catchment groups. Trends of the summary statistics were analyzed using Mann-Kendal test. The results show that SCMD shifted earlier significantly in upstream catchments of Amu Dar’ya and Syr Dar’ya, as well as in the elevation range between 2500 and 3200 m, which is in agreement with our previous work and the results of this study in general. It is reported that SCOD moved earlier significantly all over CARs, and no significant trend of SCD change can be detected in any catchment group or elevation zone, which differs from our findings. In this study, within the boundary of CARs, significantly decreased SCD was observed in mountainous areas of Tien Shan and Pamir, while only patches in WP and WT experienced SCOD shifted earlier. The disagreement might come from the different temporal overage of the two studies, or more probably the different calculation unit used when conducting trend test. As shown in our results, the trend of change for snow cover statistics exhibits large spatial variability. Calculating the trends of change at catchment groups and 100 m elevation zones within the political boundaries might

The distribution of water resources is highly variable during the year owing to unevenly distributed monsoon rainfall. High variations, combined with limited storage and flood control infrastructure, result in devastating floods in the wet season and extreme low flows in the

The relation between climate change and irrigation-related withdrawals and how important they are in determining the amount of water in the Lindis River

Drought is a natural hazard due to adverse climatic changes which affects various sectors like environment, society and economy. It occurs not only because of the scarcity of rainfall but also due to the inefficient water resource management. Studies indicate that over 30% of the entire land surface of earth is affected by drought. As a developing country, majority of Indian population depends directly or indirectly on agriculture. So the abnormal monsoon precipitation, causing loss of agricultural production, can highly influence the human life. In this paper, Karur district in Tamil Nadu which often has a very low annual rainfall is taken as the study area for drought monitoring. The technological evolution in remote sensing over the past few decades has opened a new era in the field of drought monitoring. Thus, use of remote sensing and GIS helps in developing early warnings about drought conditions which will be useful for planning the strategies for relief work. Drought analysis can be performed by calculating different drought indices like Standard Precipitation Index (SPI), Standardized Water Level Index (SWI) and Normalized Differences Vegetation Index (NDVI).Rainfall data from 2000-2009 is used to compute the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) in different time scales which is used in meteorological drought monitoring. Standardized Water Level Index (SWI) obtained from ground water level data is used for the hydrological drought analysis.