Summary

The goal is to develop a meteorological-hydrological forecasting system for transboundary water management of the Blue Nile River, using a "seamless" approach with intersecting forecast horizons ranging from days to several months (Seamless Prediction). This integrates predictive variables critical to regional water management, such as precipitation, reservoir inflow, sediment input and -transport, and even potential agricultural yield, to enable a comprehensive assessment and the derivation of recommended actions within the Water-Food-Energy nexus for the Blue Nile reservoirs and, in particular, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) reservoir.

Special focus of the ensemblebased and thus probabilistic forecasting is on the warning of hydro-meteorological extreme events such as heavy precipitation and floods (forecast horizon of several days) up to droughts and heat periods (forecast horizon of weeks to several months, i.e. Subseasonal to Seasonal - S2S).
For the transfer into practice, the developed approaches will be transferred into cloud-ready modules or microservices, which allows an implementation adapted to local conditions of, e.g., the pure hydrometeorological forecast or the visualization module. The development and implementation of the forecasting system will be carried out in close collaboration with Sudanese and Ethiopian partners from scientific, political and water management sectors. By designing the PhD research and training as a sandwich program, jointly organizing workshops and training courses, and concretely participating in higher-level initiatives and networks, an international technical dialogue between Ethiopian, Sudanese, German and other international water experts will be enabled.