Abstract:
Climate change has become a major concern and receiving serious attention at global, National,
regional and local levels. The purpose of this study is to evaluate maize crop water requirement under
climate change scenario in konso woreda, Southern Ethiopia. This was conducted based on near-term
2019-2048 projected climate variables from CORDEX-Africa data for RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios.
The projected data was quality checked, biased corrected and model performance was evaluated. Mann
Kendall trend detection and Sen’s slope estimator were used by XLSTATA software to evaluate the trends
of projection and to detect changes. The Cropwat model was used to estimate crop water requirement
of maize. Projected rainfall pattern shows decrease by 1.312mm/annual, 1.5mm/annual and 0.803
under RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 respectively. Maximum temperature projected to increase 0.004,
0.004 and 0.005̊C/annual for near term under RCP 2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios respectively.
Minimum temperature is projected to increase significantly along with calculated evapotranspiration
from projected temperature under three Scenarios. Overall result of this research shows that adaptation
measures and water harvesting technologies are mandatory and recommended for cropping season to
have sustainable production to feed increasing population.
Keywords: Climate change; Evapotranspiration; CROPWAT
