Title: Description of the practical
Course: Use of meteo data from automatic weather stations

Hydro-meteorological instruments are the backbone for capturing data related to climate, weather and water in order to assist modeling of hydrological and climatological aspects. Installing spatio-temporally representative hydro-meteorological instruments is most challenging in topographically complex basins like Ethiopia. However, it is important to install instruments that are used for calibrating and validating other alternative sources of data (satellite-derived products) and model outputs. As part of PhD study in Ethiopian Education Network to Support Agricultural Transformation (EENSAT) project, automatic hydro-meteorological instruments were installed at the Upper Tekeze basin. These instruments are expected to serve development offices even after the completion of the project life time. Hence, an evident-based manual that can guide users on how to set-up hydro-meteorlogical instruments, and how to collect and investigate the data is crucial. The main aim of this manual are:

i) to demonstrate procedures on how to install and configure automatic weather stations and loggers for groundwater and streamflow monitoring;

ii) to guide on how to download data from data loggers to personal computer;

iii) to analyze collected sample data from various loggers. In order to achieve the above objectives, the manual will utilize lessons learnt from 4 automatic weather stations, 6 groundwater observation loggers, and two stream gauging stations.

Analysis of weather station will be based-on the estimation of Reference evapotranspiration using Penman-Montheith model. Analysis of Groundwater observation will be on the temporal fluctuation of water-table. Analysis of stream-gauging data will be based on the estimation of the temporal variation of discharge from streams.

First review the description provided below and subsequently conduct the exercises.