FutureWater will provide a Tailor Made Training to water professionals at the Rwanda Water Resources Board (RWB) on Water Allocation Modeling and Remote Sensing Analysis. About 20 participants of the RWB are thought to work with the Water Evaluation And Planning model WEAP and the Remote Sensing platform of Google Earth Engine (GEE), state of the art technologies that are excellent for Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). With improved knowledge on these tools, the professionals of RWB are able to better quantify current and future impacts on the water resources of Rwanda and thus improve the quality of their advise to their stakeholders.

The training aimed at building and enhancing capabilities of the participants in environmental and hydrological monitoring and modeling and was funded by the Orange Knowledge Program of Nuffic. It gave the participants valuable and necessary knowledge on IWRM and it provided the participants with relevant hands-on experience and cutting-edge knowledge on innovative solutions in water allocation modeling and earth observation technologies.

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, the training was held online using our eLearning platform FutureWater Moodle School. The beauty of this platform is that all online sessions can be recorded and they are still available for the participants to have another look at it. All material (exercises, manuals etc.) developed during the course is also still available on our FutureWater Moodle School. The Rwanda Water Resources Board is recruiting new staff in the future and this new staff will also have access to all material.

Topics covered in the training are:

WEAP:

  • Build a WEAP model from scratch
  • Work with WEAP’ Basic Tools
  • Create and run Scenarios in WEAP
  • Extract water balances from WEAP
  • Generate a hydrological model using WEAP’ Automatic Catchment Delineation Tool

Google Earth Engine:

  • First glance at JavaScript Syntax
  • Explore and visualize Landsat 8 Imagery
  • Create charts with Monthly NDVI Values
  • Use WaPOR for Water Productivity calculations
  • Work with CHIRPS Rainfall data
  • Evaluate the water balance of a catchment