Author(s): Amir Mobasher; Manfred Ostrowski
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Keywords: No Keywords
Abstract: To improve management of the main water resource in Egypt, the Nile River, it was decided in 1956 by the Egyptian government to build one of the highest dams in the world with the biggest man made reservoir in the world which is known as Lake Nasser. It is located on the border between Egypt and Sudan. The reservoir is about 500 km long (more than 350 km in Egypt and the rest in Sudan) with a maximum width of 35 km and covers an area of 6500 km2 at its highest water level (182 m). The lake has a large annual carry-over capacity of 168. 90 x 109 m3. [Ministry of water resources and irrigation, 2005]. The operation of Lake Nasser might face challenge in the 21st century due to global warming and related climate changes. The climate change scenarios are rainfall, evaporation and the inflow into Lake Nasser. These scenarios are stochastic and vary year by year, as a result of climate change it is expected that the average Nile flow will change accordingly with significant yearly fluctuation. The main issue of this paper is to investigate the potential impacts of changing climatic conditions on the operational performance of Lake Nasser. Blue M, a model developed by the Institute for Hydraulics and Water Resources Engineering, Section for Hydrology and Water Management of the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, will be used to discuss and assess the potential modification of operation rules for the lake. Blue M is a deterministic integrated open modeling framework with special reference to reservoir systems. The modeling framework allows for the evaluation of different climate change scenarios generated by global climate models, which will be used as input to the model for simulating future inflows to the lake.
Year: 2010