Accurate measurement of rainfall is vital to analyze the spatial and temporal patterns of precipitation at various scales. However, the conventional rain gauge observations in many parts of the world such as Ethiopia are sparse and unevenly distributed. An alternative to traditional rain gauge observations could be satellite-based rainfall estimates. Satellite rainfall estimates could be used as a sole product (e.g., in areas with no (or poor) ground observations) or through integrating with rain gauge measurements. In this study, the potential of a newly available Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) rainfall product has been evaluated in comparison to rain gauge data over the Upper Blue Nile basin in Ethiopia for the period of 2000 to 2015. In addition, the Tropical Applications of Meteorology using SATellite and ground-based observations (TAMSAT 3) and the African Rainfall Climatology (ARC 2) products have been used as a benchmark and compared with CHIRPS. From the overall analysis at dekadal (10 days) and monthly temporal scale, CHIRPS exhibited better performance in comparison to TAMSAT 3 and ARC 2 products. An evaluation based on categorical/volumetric and continuous statistics indicated that CHIRPS has the greatest skills in detecting rainfall events (POD = 0.99, 1.00) and measure of volumetric rainfall (VHI = 1.00, 1.00), the highest correlation coefficients (r = 0.81, 0.88), better bias values (0.96, 0.96), and the lowest RMSE (28.45 mm dekad⁻¹, 59.03 mm month⁻¹) than TAMSAT 3 and ARC 2 products at dekadal and monthly analysis, respectively. CHIRPS overestimates the frequency of rainfall occurrence (up to 31 % at dekadal scale), although the volume of rainfall recorded during those events was very small. Indeed, TAMSAT 3 has shown a comparable performance with that of the CHIRPS product, mainly with regard to bias. The ARC 2 product was found to have the weakest performance underestimating rain gauge observed rainfall by about 24 %. In addition, the skill of CHIRPS is less affected by variation in elevation in comparison to TAMSAT 3 and ARC 2 products. CHIRPS resulted in average biases of 1.11, 0.99, and 1.00 at lower (< 1000 m a.s.l.), medium (1000 to 2000 m a.s.l.), and higher elevation (> 2000 m a.s.l.), respectively. Overall, the finding of this validation study shows the potentials of the CHIRPS product to be used for various operational applications such as rainfall pattern and variability study in the Upper Blue Nile basin in Ethiopia.

The saturation property of vegetation indices posed a known limitation and this study was motivated to understand the saturation property of three widely used vegetation indices in mixed crop-forest ecosystem where limited knowledge existed. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Simple Ratio Index (SRI) and Transformed Vegetation Index (TVI) were computed from sentinel-2 bands and; variations among bands and among vegetation indices were evaluated. The study employed green Leaf Area Index (gLAI) Version 1 product, derived from PROBA-V daily data for discriminating the saturation property of the indices. Although the study applied various methods of image preprocessing and processing, best curve fitting and correlation analysis were the key ones. The three vegetation indices: NDVI, SRI, and TVI computed from sentinel-2 bands: four (red) and five (red edge) coupled with bands 8 and 8a showed some levels of saturation. Nonetheless, TVI computed from bands 8a and 4 is the best outperforming combination, i.e., the least saturated one and it is an interesting output in a sense that a single index with significantly lower values of noise equivalent green Leaf Area Index as well as having strong association with gLAI is obtained that could be very useful for quantification of gLAI in similar ecosystems. For the rest of the bands and vegetation indices combination of the indices via setting thresholds could be one possible solution.

Precipitation is a crucial driver of hydrological processes. Ironically, a reliable characterization of its spatiotemporal variability is challenging. Ground-based rainfall measurement using rain gauges is more accurate. However, installing a dense gauging network to capture rainfall variability can be impractical. Satellite-based rainfall estimates (SREs) could be good alternatives, especially for data-scarce basins like in Ethiopia. However, SRE rainfall is plagued with uncertainties arising from many sources. The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of the latest versions of several SRE products (i.e., CHIRPS2, IMERG6, TAMSAT3 and 3B42/3) for the Dhidhessa River Basin (DRB). Both statistical and hydrological modeling approaches were used for the performance evaluation. The Soil and Water Analysis Tool (SWAT) was used for hydrological simulations. The results showed that whereas all four SRE products are promising to estimate and detect rainfall for the DRB, the CHIRPS2 dataset performed the best at annual, seasonal and monthly timescales. The hydrological simulation-based evaluation showed that SWAT's calibration results are sensitive to the rainfall dataset. The hydrological response of the basin is found to be dominated by the subsurface processes, primarily by the groundwater flux. Overall, the study showed that both CHIRPS2 and IMERG6 products could be reliable rainfall data sources for the hydrological analysis of the DRB. Moreover, the climatic season in the DRB influences rainfall and streamflow estimation. Such information is important for rainfall estimation algorithm developers.

Land degradation due to lack of sustainable land management practices is one of the critical challenges in many developing countries including Ethiopia. This study explored the major determinants of farm-level tree-planting decisions as a land management strategy in a typical farming and degraded landscape of the Modjo watershed, Ethiopia. The main data were generated from household surveys and analysed using descriptive statistics and a binary logistic regression model. The model significantly predicted farmers' tree-planting decisions (χ² = 37.29, df = 15, P < 0.001). Besides, the computed significant value of the model revealed that all the considered predictor variables jointly influenced the farmers' decisions to plant trees as a land management strategy. The findings of the study demonstrated that the adoption of tree-growing decisions by local land users was a function of a wide range of biophysical, institutional, socioeconomic and household-level factors. In this regard, the likelihood of household size, productive labour force availability, the disparity of schooling age, level of perception of the process of deforestation and the current land tenure system had a critical influence on tree-growing investment decisions in the study watershed. Eventually, the processes of land-use conversion and land degradation were serious, which in turn have had adverse effects on agricultural productivity, local food security and poverty trap nexus. Hence, the study recommended that devising and implementing sustainable land management policy options would enhance ecological restoration and livelihood sustainability in the study watershed.

Crop Growth Models (CGM) have been widely used in estimating crop yield at a local scale while Remote Sensing (RS) data has the advantage of retrieving crop parameters such as leaf Area Index (LAI) at a range of spatial scales. Data Assimilation (DA) is highly useful tool that integrates CGM and RS data derived from satellite imageries to improve the simulated crop state variables and consequently model outputs such as crop total biomass and yield. In this study, we assimilated LAI with the WOrld FOod STudies (WOFOST) model to estimate sugarcane yield using an Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) algorithm. The LAI was retrieved from Landsat 8 (L8) optical and Sentinel 1A (S1A) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imageries using a Gaussian Process regression (GPR) method. The Deterministic Modeling (DM), independent assimilations of LAI retrieved from L8 and S1A, and assimilation of LAI retrieved from a combined SAR-optical data were tested and validated using field observation data in the Wonji-Shoa sugar plantation, Ethiopia. The results demonstrate that the accuracy of sugarcane yield estimated by the WOFOST model was significantly improved after DA using combined L8 and S1A data. Compared to the DM estimation, the root mean square error (RMSE) was decreased by 2.13 t/ha for the independent assimilations of LAI retrieved from L8, 3.96 t/ha for the independent assimilations of LAI retrieved from S1A and 5.94 t/ha for combined assimilation of L8 and S1A LAI. A coefficients of determination (R²) of 0.36, 0.48, 0.53, and 0.69 and Normalized Root mean square error (NRMSE) of 14.72%, 11.67%, 10.55%, and 8.44% were obtained for DM, L8 LAI assimilation alone, S1A LAI assimilation alone and combined L8 and S1A LAI assimilation, respectively. The results show that combined L8 and S1A LAI DA has better performance because SAR and optical data have complementary effects. Hence, the assimilation of LAI from combined L8 and S1A data into the WOFOST model provides a robust technique to improve crop yield estimations.