Deterioration of upland soils, demographic growth, and climate change all lead to an increased utilization of wetlands in East Africa. This considerable pressure on wetland resources results in trade-offs between those resources and their related ecosystem services. Furthermore, relationships between catchment attributes and available wetland water resources are one of the key drivers that might lead to wetland degradation. To investigate the impacts of these developments on catchment-wetland water resources, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was applied to the Kilombero Catchment in Tanzania, which is like many other East African catchments, as it is characterized by overall data scarcity. Due to the lack of recent discharge data, the model was calibrated for the period from 1958-1965 (R 2 = 0.86, NSE = 0.85, KGE = 0.93) and validated from 1966-1970 (R 2 = 0.80, NSE = 0.80, KGE = 0.89) with the sequential uncertainty fitting algorithm (SUFI-2) on a daily resolution. Results show the dependency of the wetland on baseflow contribution from the enclosing catchment, especially in dry season. Main contributions with regard to overall water yield arise from the northern mountains and the southeastern highlands, which are characterized by steep slopes and a high share of forest and savanna vegetation, respectively. Simulations of land use change effects, generated with Landsat images from the 1970s up to 2014, show severe shifts in the water balance components on the subcatchment scale due to anthropogenic activities. Sustainable management of the investigated catchment should therefore account for the catchment-wetland interaction concerning water resources, with a special emphasis on groundwater fluxes to ensure future food production as well as the preservation of the wetland ecosystem.

This article illustrates the impact of potential future climate scenarios on water quantity in time and space for an East African floodplain catchment surrounded by mountainous areas. In East Africa, agricultural intensification is shifting from upland cultivation into the wetlands due to year-round water availability and fertile soils. These advantageous agricultural conditions might be hampered through climate change impacts. Additionally, water-related risks, like droughts and flooding events, are likely to increase. Hence, this study investigates future climate patterns and their impact on water resources in one production cluster in Tanzania. To account for these changes, a regional climate model ensemble of the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) Africa project was analyzed to investigate changes in climatic patterns until 2060, according to the RCP4.5 (representative concentration pathways) and RCP8.5 scenarios. The semi-distributed Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was utilized to analyze the impacts on water resources according to all scenarios. Modeling results indicate increasing temperatures, especially in the hot dry season, intensifying the distinctive features of the dry and rainy season. This consequently aggravates hydrological extremes, such as more-pronounced flooding and decreasing low flows. Overall, annual averages of water yield and surface runoff increase up to 61.6% and 67.8%, respectively, within the bias-corrected scenario simulations, compared to the historical simulations. However, changes in precipitation among the analyzed scenarios vary between −8.3% and +22.5% of the annual averages. Hydrological modeling results also show heterogeneous spatial patterns inside the catchment. These spatio-temporal patterns indicate the possibility of an aggravation for severe floods in wet seasons, as well as an increasing drought risk in dry seasons across the scenario simulations. Apart from that, the discharge peak, which is crucial for the flood recession agriculture in the floodplain, is likely to shift from April to May from the 2020s onwards.

Previous studies on observed or projected rainfall trends for the Greater Horn of Africa (GHA) generally focus on calendric 3-month periods, and thus partly neglect the complexity of rainfall seasonality in this topographically heterogeneous region. This study introduces a novel and flexible methodology to identify the rainfall seasonality, the onset, cessation and duration of the rainy seasons and the associated uncertainties from rainfall time series. The definition is applied to the Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) satellite product and an extensive rain gauge data set. A strong agreement with known seasonal dynamics in the region and the commonly used calendric rainy seasons is demonstrated. Compared to the latter definition, a clear added value is found for the new approach as it captures the local rainfall features (associated with, for example, the sea breeze), thus facilitating evaluations across rainfall seasonality borders. While previously known trends are qualitatively confirmed, trends are amplified in some regions using the flexible definition method. Notably, a drying trend in Tanzania and Democratic Republic of Congo and a wetting trend in central Sudan and parts of eastern Ethiopia and Kenya can be detected. The trends are regionally associated with changes in rainy season cessation. CHIRPS and station trend patterns are consistent over larger regions of the GHA, but differ in regions with known rainfall contributions from warmer cloud tops. Discrepancies are found in coastal and topographically complex areas, and regions with an unstable seasonality of rainfall. As expected, CHIRPS shows spatially more homogeneous trends compared to station data. The more precise definition of the rainy season facilitates the assessment of rainfall characteristics like intensity, rainfall amounts or temporal shifts of rainy seasons. This novel methodology could also provide a more adequate calibration of climate model simulations thus potentially enabling more realistic climate change projections for the GHA.