Dry spell,onset and cessation of the wet season rainfall in the Upper Baro-Akobo Basin,Ethiopia

In this study, maximum dry spell length and number of dry spell periods of rainy seasons in the upper Baro-Akobo River basin which is a part of the Nile basin, Western Ethiopia, were investigated to analyse the drought trend. Daily rainfall records of the period 1972–2000 from eight rain gauge stations were used in the analysis, and Mann-Kendall test was used to test trends for significance. Furthermore, the beginning and end of the trend development in the dry spell were also tested using the sequential version of Mann-Kendall test. Results have shown that there is neither clear monotonic trend found in dry spell for the basin nor significant fluctuation in the onset, cession and duration of rainfall in the Baro-Akobo river basin. This sufficiently explains why rain-fed agriculture has suffered little in the western part of Ethiopia. The predictable nature of dry spell pattern may have allowed farmers to adjust to rainfall variability in the basin. Unlike many parts of Ethiopia, the Baro-Akobo basin climate variability is not a limiting factor for rain-fed agriculture productivity which may contribute significantly to national food security.     

Landslide susceptibility evaluation in the Chemoga watershed,upper Blue Nile,Ethiopia

Landslide susceptibility consists of an essential component in the day-to-day activity of human beings. Landslide incidents are typically happening at a low rate of recurrence when compared and in contrast to other events. This might be generated into main natural catastrophes relating to widespread and undesirable sound effects. Landslide hotspot area identification and mapping are used for the regional community to secure from this disaster. Therefore, this research aims to identify the hotspot areas of landslide and to generate maps using GIS, AHP, and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). MCDA techniques are applied under such circumstances to categorize and class decisions for successive comprehensive estimation or else to state possible from impossible potentiality with various landslides. Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) constructively applies for conveying influence to different criteria within multi-criteria decision analysis. The causative landslide identifying factors utilized in this research were elevation, slope, aspect, soil type, lithology, distance to stream, land use/land cover, rainfall, and drainage density achieved from various sources. Subsequently, to explain the significance of each constraint into landslide susceptibility, all factors were found using the AHP technique. Generally, landslide susceptibility map factors were multiplied by their weights to acquire with the AHP technique. The result showed that the AHP methods are comparatively good quality estimators of landslide susceptibility identification in the Chemoga watershed. As the result, the Chemoga watershed landslide susceptibility map classes were classified as 46.52%, 13.83%.18.71%, 15.39%, and 5.55% of the occurred landslide fall to very low, low, moderate, high, and very high susceptibility zones, respectively. Performance and accuracy of modeled maps have been established using GPS field data and Google earth data landslide map and area under curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC). As the result, validation depends on the ROC specifies the accuracy of the map formed with the AHP merged through weighted overly method illustrated very good accuracy of AUC value 81.45%. In general, the research outcomes inveterate the very good test consistency of the generated maps.