Modeling the spatial and temporal availability of water resources potential over Abbay river basin, Ethiopia

Study region: Abbay River Basin, Ethiopia. Study focus: This research focused on assessing the spatio-temporal availability and variability of water resources potential using physically based hydrological model. The availability and spatial variability of water balance components were modeled for each subbasins of Abbay River basin. New hydrological insights for the region: Multi statistical performance criteria proved that ArcSWAT model has the capacity to reproduce flows that agree with the measured flows at daily time scale simulation and found as applicable over Abbay River basin. The Calibration and Validation were done at different subbasins. The result revealed that the performance of the model well improved as the basin was partitioned into subbasins. For reproduction of the measured flow at different flow segments, the model performed very good especially for high and peak flows segments. The rainfall distribution revealed that the basin is characterized by high spatial and temporal varia-tion of rainfall. Three fourth of the annual rainfall was contributed from June to September. The water balance components analysis proved that Evapotranspiration is high over the basin which covers more than half (55.20 %) of the annual rainfall. Water yield (WYLD_Qmm) covers only 21.73 % of the annual rainfall. This research can be used as basis to give emphasis on water resources potential modeling in the future considering climate and land use changes.