Africa Platform

Annual evaporation from hydropower reservoirs
Evaporation from hydropower reservoirs represents a key component of the reservoir water budget. Depending on the different climate regimes on the continent, the rate of evaporation from open water changes with region-specific temperature, wind speed, relative humidity and solar radiation. This map shows the annual mean evaporation rate (mm/year) at the centroid of African reservoirs subject to hydropower production, for the year 2016.

Data provider

EC-JRC
Suggested citation

Sanchez, R. G., Seliger, R., Fahl, F., Felice, L. De, Ouarda, T. B. M. J., & Farinosi, F. (2020). Freshwater use of the energy sector in Africa. Applied Energy, 270(May), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2020.115171
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Licence

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Date or time period of observation

2016
Frequency of update

Not Updated
Geographic coverage

Africa
Spatial Resolution

Hydropower reservoir
Technical background

The potential evaporation from reservoir water surfaces is obtained by applying the FAO methodology for open water surfaces (FAO 2015). Reference evapotranspiration data, based on ERA5 data (Copernicus Climate Change Service, 2017) is obtained from the JRC LISVAP pre-processor for the LISFLOOD water balance and flood simulation model (Alfieri et al., 2020; Burek et al., 2013) References: * Alfieri, L., Lorini, V., Hirpa, F. A., Harrigan, S., Zsoter, E., Prudhomme, C., … Ecmwf, F. (2020). A global streamflow reanalysis for 1980 – 2018. Journal of Hydrology, 6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hydroa.2019.100049 * Burek, P., van der Knijff, J., & Ntegeka, V. (2013). LISVAP evaporation pre-processor for the LISFLOOD water balance and flood simulation model. Ispra. * Copernicus Climate Change Service (2017). ERA5: Fifth generation of ECMWF atmospheric reanalyses of the global climate. Retrieved August 12, 2019, from https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/home * FAO (2015). Evaporation from artificial lakes and reservoirs.
Cautions

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Related SDGs and targets

GOAL 07: Affordable and clean energy, GOAL 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
Related Topics

Natural Resources, Water & Freshwater, Energy, Energy Production, Clean & Renewable Energy

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