Regulation of the White Nile
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Hydrological Sciences - Journal - des Sciences Hydrologiques, 29, 2, 6/1984 Regulation of the White Nile G. W. KITE* G.K. Associates, Consulting Engineers, 17 Spindrift Court, South Parade, West Kirby, Wirral L48 ORR, UK ABSTRACT The paper summarizes investigations made into regulation of the White Nile during Phase III of the WMO/UNDP Hydrometeorological Survey of the catchments of Lakes Victoria, Kyoga and Mobuto Sese Seko. A number of historical regulation plans were evaluated using the mathematical model developed by the project. A series of new plans was devised to provide benefits to the riparian countries although, due to lack of data, economic and ecological effects were not included. Régularisation du Nil Blanc RESUME Le texte résume les recherches concernant la régularisation du Nil Blanc faites pendant la deuxième phase de l'étude "Relevé hydrométéorologique des bassins versants des lacs Victoria, Kyoga et Mobutu Sese Seko" par l'OMM et le PNUD. La valeur de divers plans de régularisation hist orique a pu être estimée grâce au modèle mathématique mis au point par le projet. Une série de nouveaux plans a été préparée au profit des pays riverains mais, en raison del' absence de données, les effets économiques et écologiques n'ont pas été inclus dans cette étude. INTRODUCTION At one end of the basin of the River Nile (Fig.l) lies a chain of three major lakes; Victoria, Kyoga and Mobuto Sese Seko (Albert), containing an estimated 3200 km of fresh water. At the other end of the basin, and separated from the upper basin by 1500 km of desert, lies Egypt, a densely populated country totally dependent for its drinking water, its irrigation water and its water for power on the continued flow of the Nile. This situation led to the development in the early twentieth century of the first plans to regulate and control the lakes of the Nile basin to increase the reliability and usefulness of river flows. Since that time other regulation plans have been designed with similar and with different objectives. As part of Phase II of the WMO/UNDP Hydrometeorological Survey of the catchments of Lakes Victoria, Kyoga and Mobuto Sese Seko, 1976-1981, a comprehensive study was made of these historical regulation plans using a deterministic mathematical model of the lake system developed in Phase II (Nèmec & Kite, 1979). Following *Now: Chief Technical Adviser, WMO, c/o UNDP, PO Box 107, Kathmandu, Nepal. 191 192 G.W. Kite Fig. 1 The Nile basin. this historical survey, a series of new regulation plans was prepared utilizing the best parts of the historic plans and attempting to improve upon their performances. Full details of the studies are available in a report presented to the participat ing governments (Burundi, Egypt, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda) by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, 1982). DATA Before a regulation plan can be tested it is necessary to obtain a set of data for the lake or reservoir over some historical period. The regulation plan then operates on these water supplies to produce a set of artificial lake levels and outflows correspond ing to the internal set of control rules. These data (usually termed net basin supplies, NBS) can be obtained in two ways. Firstly, and most obviously, they can be obtained from the river flows into the lake (I), the rainfall over the lake (R) and the evaporation from the lake (E) as: Regulation of the White Nile 193 NBS* + R = It t The disadvantage of this method is that meteorological data are often available for shorter periods than hydrological data and so for Lakes Victoria, Kyoga and Mobuto sets of monthly net basin supplies were calculated for the common period of January 1912 to December 1977 as: NBSt = ASt + 0t - It where 0+ and It are recorded natural lake outflows and inflows and AS + is the change in storage of the lake over the month, computed from the recorded beginning-of-month lake stages, Ht, as: ASt = f(Ht - Ht_1) where f indicates the lake stage-volume relationship. Also needed as basic data were dead storages (the volumes and corresponding stages below which control of outflow is not possible), the lake stages and volumes at the start of the common period and stage-outflow and stage-area-volume relationships for each lake. Figure 2 shows these relationships for Lake Victoria. STAGE-AREA STAGE-FLOW 1137 11J7- 36 3fi- „ 35 3b- E 34 34 ^"'' 33 / « 32 32 / rj; 3i 31 1 <1130 1130- ' 2 29 ?q- i « 28 28 27 27- 26 26H 1125 11?5 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 3 AREA KM «10 VICTORIA NILE FLOW m /s «10'' 1137- STAGE-VOLUME 36- 35-) E 34 <ë 33 I 32-1 w 31 < 1130 5 29' ^ 28 27- 26- 1125 24 25 26 27 28 29 VOLUME KM'xIO1 Fig. 2 Lake Victoria characteristic curves. HISTORICAL REGULATION PLANS During the early decades of this century the Government of Egypt became concerned at the apparent conflict between a rapidly rising 194 G.W. Kite population with its increasing need for water and the finite availability of this water. As a temporary solution to this problem the Government of Egypt submitted to the Sudanese Government in 1928 and again in 1938 a plan (known as the Equatorial Nile Project) to provide more water for irrigation during that portion of the year (the untimely period, January to June) when flows from the Blue Nile were low. The increased flow was to be obtained from the White Nile by storing water in Lakes Victoria, Kyoga and Mobuto Sese Seko (termed "Century Storage" because of the design period of the reservoirs) and by diverting the flow of the White Nile around the Sudd, in southern Sudan, through two canals. This grandiose plan is described in Hurst et al. (1946). Two regulation plans were tested; the first, named Hurst 1946 (i), regulated only Lake 3 — 1 Mobutu and restricted outflows to 1157 m s during January to June 3 — 1 and to 500 m s for July to December. The second plan, Hurst 1946 (ii) regulated Lake Mobutu as in plan (i) and also restrained the outflow of Lake Victoria to its long term mean flow. It was quickly realized that these plans had two major disadvantages. Firstly, by reversing the normal seasonal fluctuations in the flow of the White Nile, considerable hardship would have been caused to the pastoral Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk people of southern Sudan. Secondly, utilizing constant outflows from the lakes would have caused large fluctuations in lake levels resulting in increased damages to lake-shore interests in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Following an 8-year study the Equatorial Nile Project was dropped, Egypt and Sudan signed, in 1959, the Nile Waters Agreement allocating available waters between the two countries, and Egypt followed an alternative development path by constructing the high Aswan dam with its large reservoir capable of over-year storage. In 1947, following discussions with the Governments of Egypt and Sudan, the Government of Uganda put forward a plan to regulate Lake Victoria to maximize the benefits for the proposed Owen Falls hydroelectric plant at Jinja. This plan (Uganda 1947) proposed an 3 —1 optimum release from Lake Victoria of 666 m s with provision for modifying this flow should the lake level go above or below a 2 m allowable range. Lakes Kyoga and Mobutu were to remain unregulated. In 1968 the Government of Uganda proposed a variation on Uganda 1947 in which the allowable range in lake level and the required outflow were modified to take into account the change in lake regime which had taken place in the early I960's (Kite, 1981). The first plans to consider regulating all three lakes (Victoria, Kyoga and Mobutu) were proposed by Dr M.Amin, a consultant to the Egyptian Ministry of Irrigation, in 1958. His series of four regulation plans (Amin 1958 a,b,c and d) contained variations such as constant outflow from Lake Victoria, either constant level or constant outflow for Lake Kyoga and constant outflow from Lake Mobutu. No variations of flow with time of year were considered, reflecting the changed interests of downstream countries following completion of the high Aswan dam. Another plan published by Amin in 1960 proposed that all three lakes have outflows restricted to their respective long-term mean flows. The difficulties with plans such as these are twofold: firstly, time series of lake levels and outflows are often not stationary; that is, statistics such as mean and variance are not time-invariant Regulation of the White Nile 195 (when Amin published his 1960 plan the mean outflow of Lake Victoria over the evaluation period which he used, 1904-1957, was 670 m3s-1 whereas the mean outflow over the period used in the present study, 1912-1977, is 794 m3s_1). The second difficulty is that, as mentioned earlier, use of a single constant outflow results in an excessive range of lake levels. The latest and most sophisticated of the historical regulation plans is Plan 100-A proposed by the Egyptian Organization for Nile Waters. This plan allows a wide range of outflows for Lake Victoria with a desirable flow (draft) of 750 m s-1 but provision for higher or lower flows should the lake level go beyond aim allowable range. Lake Kyoga was to be maintained at a constant level for as much of the time as possible, but with a provision for change in level when necessary. The change in level of Lake Kyoga was to be controlled by reference to a scale made up by adding up the active storages contained in Lakes Victoria and Mobutu.