The potential for rainwater harvesting
| dc.contributor.author | Kazuzuru, Benedicto | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-11-11T09:24:16Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-11-11T09:24:16Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2004 | |
| dc.description | Dissertation | |
| dc.description.abstract | Rainwater harvest has become one of the strategies by the Tanzanian government in fighting the persistent drought in the country. The government awareness of the importance and use of the rainwater harvest has been facilitated by the joint team of experts from the Sokoine University of Agriculture and the University of Newcastle working to develop a model of the rainwater harvest (RWH) process as an aid to identifying best-bet options The joint team of experts from the two universities has developed a computer program to support their work on rainwater harvest. This is called PARCHED-THIRST, which is an acronym for, Predicting Arable Resource Capture in Hostile Environments During The Harvesting of Incident Rainfall in Semi-arid Tropics). Among its key functions, PARCHED THIRST simulates agrometeorological variables for use as inputs in the simulation of crop growth. This project assesses the simulation of climatic variables,rainfall and temperature in particular. The project looks at the, flexibility of the PT software and the methodology used in the simulation. The data used for analysis is from Arusha (1970-2000) in Tanzania, which has been supplied within the software. This site has longest records of climatic data among the sites whose data is supplied within the software. An exploration of the data indicates that, the PT models the means (monthly, weekly, yearly) effectively but underestimate the spread of the data. The analysis of the rainfall data indicates that higher order Markov chains are needed at the site in Tanzania as this leads to an improvement in modelling the spread of the data. For the temperature data, the assumption of first order autoregressive process was found to be valid, but the assumed stationerity of the correlations did not hold. The flexibility of the PT software has generally been found to be good, following updates by the PT team at Sokoine University over the last three years. However the software needs to be further modified to suit the varied needs of its intended customers. | |
| dc.description.sponsorship | Association of Commonwealth Scholarship | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://www.suaire.sua.ac.tz/handle/20.500.14820/7136 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | Sokoine University of Agriculture | |
| dc.subject | Rainwater harvest | |
| dc.subject | Hostile environments | |
| dc.subject | Rainwater harvest system | |
| dc.subject | Agrometeorological variable | |
| dc.title | The potential for rainwater harvesting | |
| dc.type | Thesis |