THE SPECTACULAR WATERS of the Nile River flow like blood through the veins as they move north from the Equatorial Lakes to the Mediterranean Sea. For the people of eastern Africa, the river is life itself. It feeds their soil, growing crops and sustaining livestock. It fuels their economic development. It is the source of religious traditions and rituals that give their lives meaning.

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Little wonder, then, that any changes proposed along the river's 4,000-mile path, which touches the lives of 250 million people, can lead to conflicts and must be agreed upon by everyone involved.

"I think it was Mark Twain who said, 'Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting'," recalls Dr. Aris Georgakakos, a Georgia Institute of Technology professor who specializes in water resources. "Today and in the years to come, in many parts of the world, water is and will continue to be a serious reason for conflict ... especially when many countries are sharing a limited resource."

But Georgakakos also hopes work done here at Georgia Tech will help lessen and resolve such conflicts. Currently, he is overseeing a project to design an integrated decision support system to manage the Nile River in a sustainable way.

That means developing a system based on sound scientific research that examines the many complex factors of water management, from weather dynamics to river hydraulics to human demand. The system then becomes a valuable tool for helping policy makers and river basin planners agree on how best to manage the Nile fairly for years to come.

"To do that realistically and on a factual basis, they need to have models like the ones we developed, to quantify the impacts of alternative operational scenarios on the various water uses," says Georgakakos, head of the Environmental Hydraulics and Water Resources Group in Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the school's associate chair for research.

"If they have a system that they all agree upon and trust, to assess what the river can do for them, I think that they have a solid basis for communication and a good chance to resolve their differences peacefully," he continues.

The more than $10 million Nile River project is being sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development, through a contractual services agreement with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. A collaborative effort between Georgia Tech and the U.S. National Weather Service, it is being carried out for the Egyptian government.

Part of the system already is operating at the Nile Forecast and Control Center at the Ministry of Public Works and Water Resources in Egypt. Several Egyptian engineers and senior officials have been trained to understand and operate it. In addition, these engineers have spent time at Georgia Tech and the National Weather Service, helping to design the river forecasting and decision models.

The decision system also was discussed in October 1995 when senior officials from seven Nilotic countries--Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire--met in Rome, under the auspices of the FAO. Other countries affected by the Nile or its tributaries include Burundi, Eritrea and Rwanda.

Representatives who attended the meeting took stock of Egypt's progress in developing a model for monitoring, forecasting, simulation and control of the Nile. Several of them said their people need to develop more technical expertise in water resources management, an area where Georgia Tech can provide effective assistance.

Georgia Tech's educational program in water resources includes training, technology transfer activities, regular courses at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels, and short courses and seminars for the continuing education of engineering professionals.

Decision support systems are used to design and operate water resources systems efficiently. They rely on hydrometeorological data, including satellite images, river flow and stage hydrographs, rainfall observations, and soil moisture distribution and changes.

Such data, gathered from satellites, radars and on-site sensors, are valuable for understanding how water resources systems work, and are much more accessible to management authorities today than in the past.

Once set up, a decision support system offers the capability to simulate the response of watersheds, rivers and reservoirs to different climatic inputs and decision policies; to predict water and power demands; and to quantify the tradeoffs among different water uses. Components also may perform water quality and ecosystem simulations, study the conjunctive use of surface and ground waters, or assess the impacts of climate changes.

The system is not meant to replace the management authorities, only quantify the pros and cons of different operational and planning options, Georgakakos says. And it must be as fluid as the rivers it controls, able to relate well to all temporal and spatial scales of interest.

For the Nile, major issues include: hydroelectric development proposed in Ethiopia, which commands the source region of the Blue Nile; regulation and future development of the Equatorial Lakes--Lake Albert, Lake Kyoga and Lake Victoria; and various conservation projects proposed for the White Nile, including construction of the Jonglei Canal in Southern Sudan, to bypass a swamp that absorbs nearly 50 percent of the Nile water passing through that area.

"Changes can have serious consequences, especially for Sudan and Egypt, the downstream nations for which the Nile is the only source of water supply," Georgakakos says.

Georgia Tech's decision system also includes an operational module for the High Aswan Dam in Egypt, looking at the day-to-day management of this reservoir, as well as how it interacts with the Equatorial Lakes and other upstream storage facilities. Built in 1968, the dam is the cornerstone of Egypt's economy. It provides a stable water supply, countering the Nile River's historic hydrologic persistence, which yields high or low flows for several years at a time.

"Because of this river feature, Egypt could not exist as we know it today without the High Aswan Dam," Georgakakos says.

However, when a river's natural regime is altered, it may affect the surrounding environment and ecology. Today, assessing and mitigating these risks has become an important part of water resources management.

"We begin to understand that whatever we do has consequences," Georgakakos says. "So in planning the development and operation of water resources projects, we must not only consider traditional water uses like hydropower, flood control, water supply, navigation and recreation, but also look at the long-term sustainability of the resource, environmentally and ecologically."

The Nile River project is about a year away from completion, but already, it is being used as a prototype for other river basins.

Similar projects are in the works for the Yangtze River in China, the Iguacu in Brazil, the Achelloos in Greece and several rivers in Mexico. In the United States, decision support systems also have been developed for the Upper Des Moines River in the Midwest and the Southeastern U.S. reservoir system, which includes the Savannah, Apalachicola- Chattahoochee-Flint and Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa Rivers.

Although a handful of other universities have strong water resources programs, Georgakakos says Tech offers a uniquely integrated team approach. By designing decision support systems that pull together all the complex factors of water management, researchers hope to lead the way in changing failed practices.

In this vein, Georgia Tech will continue ongoing partnerships with the FAO, the Hydrologic Research Center in San Diego, the Office of Hydrology of the National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Environmental Sciences Division in Tennessee.

"There are many facets to water resources, and it is very important that decision makers understand their short- and long-term interactions before formulating management policies," Georgakakos says.

"Based on the research that Tech and other research organizations have done over the past 10 to 15 years, we have made great strides in many aspects of water management," he adds. "And what is more, we have learned how to package it all into a nice system like the one we developed for the Nile."

Further information is available from Dr. Aris Georgakakos, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0355. (Telephone: 404/894-2240) (E-mail: aris.georgakakos@ce.gatech.edu)

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Last updated: 12 Sept. 1996