Two Decades of Hydrologic Modeling and Predictions in the Congo River Basin

Abstract

This paper provides an insight into the past two decades hydrologic modeling efforts and establish a diagnostic evaluation, necessary to guide future scientific endeavors for the benefit of model comparison, knowledge advancement and information sharing, in support of policy decision of water resources management in the CRB. Two application cases, the GW-Pitman and WEAP models, are used to illustrate processes and challenges of hydrologic model applications with regard to model parameter estimation and uncertainty prediction, modelling lakes and wetlands processes and water allocation. The analysis shows that there has been a great deal of efforts from the past modeling studies to address both data issues and process understanding and to establish models that represent the basin's hydrologic processes. The analysis also shows that there is still a number of issues and uncertainties that should attract the attention of future modelling studies - right modeling for the right reason . We argue that many hydrologic model developments during the past two decades in the basin have been initiated mainly in an experimental phase, testing the models’ performance in a new and data scarce environment, and not for solving the real hydrologic and water resources management issues of day-to-day life. For this reason, it has been difficult to utilize the models in support of policy decision of river basin management and development. These findings collectively reveal the need to look for adequate approaches to modeling the hydrology and generating knowledge at appropriate scales for policy decision and management in the CRB.