Thursday, November 29, 2007

Okavango Delta moisture feedback study



Maarten Smoorenburg, Master's student in civil engineering at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, made a presentation at HOORC today about his fieldwork of the past seven weeks, carried out with HOORC's Dr Piotr Wolski, to measure soil moisture and floodplain infiltration in the Okavango Delta. The study aimed to map moisture feedback to the atmosphere from the Delta's wetlands to contribute to a regional climate model. The fieldwork found that the band of wet land along temporarily flooded plains was more extensive than anticipated, indicating a larger contribution of moisture to the atmosphere over the Delta. The findings will be added to a study being carried out by Albert Kachapila under a research programme of UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education and the Dutch Royal Meteorological Institute (KNMI).

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